Chinese Name Stroke Analysis: The Five Grids, Counted

Chinese name stroke analysis — Wu Ge, the five-grid method — was assembled in Japan in the 1920s and taken into Chinese naming practice afterwards. It takes a written name, counts the strokes in each character, and produces five sums. That part is reproducible: anyone with a stroke list gets the same five numbers.

The stroke standard is the Kangxi dictionary, not the forms people write today, which is the first thing that separates one calculator from another. And the five sums then get read through a table of eighty-one values, each with a label. The arithmetic can be checked by counting. The labels cannot be checked against anything, and the two halves of the method deserve to be kept apart.

Every grid is a different sum over the same characters, and the formulas depend on whether the surname and the given name have one character or two:

The outer grid is where most hand calculations go wrong, because it has four cases rather than one. Single surname and single given name: it is fixed at 2. Single surname and two-character given name: second given-name character plus 1. Two-character surname and single given name: first surname character plus 1. Two-character surname and two-character given name: first surname character plus the second given-name character. The shortcut of taking the total grid, subtracting the personality grid and adding 1 gives the right answer in only one of those four cases — a single-character surname with a two-character given name — which is why two calculators can agree on four grids and disagree on the fifth.

Count traditional forms, not simplified ones. 国 is eight strokes as written today and 國 is eleven. 强 is twelve and 強 is eleven. Getting this wrong moves the earth, outer and total grids at once, which is why a name that looks excellent on one site can look mixed on another.

Count a radical as the character it came from. Three-dot water is the four strokes of 水, the grass radical the six of 艸, the hand radical the four of 手, the beast radical the four of 犬. The left ear is eight (阜) and the right ear is seven (邑), which is the one people routinely get backwards.

Numerals have no special rule: 一 is one stroke, 二 is two, 三 is three. A single-character given name is not exempt from the earth grid's plus-one; it is exactly where that plus-one comes from.

Expect the schools to disagree. Different stroke traditions give different totals for the same character, and the eighty-one labels differ between editions at the borderline numbers. Where two calculators disagree, the disagreement is the finding: these are inherited conventions, not a property of the character.

Take 王志强, a name chosen for 志 (resolve) and 强 (strength). Written with the traditional 強 at eleven strokes, the five grids are: heaven 5, personality 11, earth 18, outer 12, total 22. Written with the simplified 强 at twelve strokes, the same name gives heaven 5, personality 11, earth 19, outer 13, total 23.

In the version of the eighty-one table that most calculators reproduce, 5, 11, 13, 18 and 23 are read as favourable, while 12, 19 and 22 are not. So the traditional spelling lands two unfavourable grids out of five and the simplified spelling lands one. Nothing about the child changed. Only the character did, and only in the way it is written.

For comparison, 王小明 — 王 4, 小 3, 明 8 — gives heaven 5, personality 7, earth 11, outer 9, total 15. That chart is often described as uniformly good, but 9 is read as unfavourable in the same table, so it is four out of five. The point of running the numbers is not to find a perfect name; it is to see how much of the result comes from decisions that have nothing to do with the person.

The eighty-one labels have no derivation. They were compiled inside the same system that counts the strokes, and no edition explains where a given phrase came from, which is why the borderline numbers differ between books. A favourable total is a statement about the table, not about the child.

The descriptions attached to each grid are broad enough to fit almost anyone — a temperament, a direction, a period of life. That is the structure of a statement that reads as insight without carrying information, and it is the same reason a horoscope column feels specific.

The thirty-six-year split between the earth grid and the total grid is inherited, not observed; nothing happens on that birthday. And no study has shown that people with a favourable total fare differently from people with an unfavourable one, which is what would be needed for the labels to mean anything about a life.

Meaning, sound and written form come first, and they are checkable in ways the chart is not: say the name out loud, write it by hand, see whether it survives being called across a room and typed into a form. Family fit comes next. Stroke analysis belongs at the end, as a tiebreaker between two names that are already equal on everything that matters.

That is the only role where the arithmetic adds something real — it is consistent, so it lets a family write a preference down and compare. What it should never do is remove a character someone loves, or add one nobody can pronounce, on the strength of a number in a table that no one has ever tested.