A naming decision is made on sound and meaning, then checked against tradition
The earliest systematic statement of Chinese naming that survives is a short answer in the Zuo Tradition. Asked what to name his newborn son, Shen Xu answers that names come in five kinds — from the circumstance of the birth, from a virtue, from a resemblance, from an object, from the father — and then lists six things a name is not taken from: a state, an office, a mountain or river, a hidden illness, a domestic animal, a ritual vessel. His reason is practical rather than mystical. The Zhou used tabooing in the service of the spirits, and a name will be tabooed in the end, so a name whose avoidance costs nothing is the one to choose. What is absent from that whole passage is every numerological device that later got attached to naming. No stroke count, no five-phase fit, no score. The classical statement is about meaning, reference, and the consequences of the word itself — which is also where the decision is still made today.
Four traditions get applied to the same name, and they do not convert
Most naming advice blends four separate traditions without saying so, and each answers a different question. Sound and meaning answer what the name says and how it carries. Stroke counting answers how many marks each character takes. Five-elements selection answers which phase the chart is short of. Written form answers how the name survives being written and typed for a lifetime. They are not translations of one another: a name can be excellent on meaning and unremarkable on stroke count, and the reverse is just as common. The practical consequence is that no single ranking of names exists, and any tool that returns one has silently picked weights for you. Keeping the four apart is most of the work of choosing a name well.
Stroke counting: five sums over the same characters
The stroke-count method — Wu Ge, the five grids — takes a written name, counts the strokes in each character, and reads the five resulting numbers through a traditional table of favourable and unfavourable values. The system was built in Japan in the early twentieth century and adopted into Chinese naming practice afterwards, which is why its stroke standard is the Kangxi dictionary rather than the forms people write today. Every grid is a different sum over the same two or three characters, and the numbers move depending on four decisions that are conventions rather than measurements: traditional characters rather than simplified, radicals counted as the characters they came from, and the luck tables themselves. Where two calculators disagree about a name, the disagreement is the finding.
Five elements: the step that carries the weight is the one that is argued about
A five-elements selection starts from a birth chart and ends at a shortlist of characters. In between it fixes the birth data, lays out the four pillars, names the Day Master, and judges which element the chart is short of. The first three of those are reproducible arithmetic. The fourth is a judgement about the whole chart — how much support the Day Master has, whether the season is on its side, what the month branch contributes — and it is exactly there that two schools read the same chart and name opposite useful elements. The classical statement of the five phases gives each phase a behaviour — water soaks and descends, fire flames and rises, wood bends and straightens, metal yields and changes, earth accepts and grows — and contains no industry classification at all.
The order to apply them in
Meaning and sound come first, because they are what a person hears inside their own name and what the family can check by saying it out loud. Written form comes next, because a name filled into a form several thousand times is worth choosing partly for how long it takes to write. Stroke counting and five-elements fit come after, and only as tiebreakers between names that already work. For a business name the order shifts once more: trademark, domain, sayability and signage all come before any element reading, and a name that fails one of those fails regardless of its phase. None of the four traditions reaches a person's health, schooling, work or relationships, and none of them needs correcting by swapping out a character the family already loves.