1. Purpose:

In 2016, I, an IT loser, finally had my love child — my wife got pregnant. As the wife’s belly grows big every day, a very arduous task fell on my head, that is – name. Because I used to brag to my wife, read poems and books, and have profound literary skills (actually, read online novels), my wife assigned this task, and I seemed to be able to accept it gladly. Plus, the joy of being a dad made me pat my chest and say, “No problem, I’ll make sure I get a good name.”

2. As an IT person, do you have any superior solutions

After receiving this task, absolutely dare not perfunctory, as IT code farmers, began to take out my super executive power. First of all, I searched in my mind again and again, all kinds of poetry, prose, fiction literature collection, ancient and modern Chinese and foreign celebrities, and even network novels of the leading role of the supporting name…

However, embarrassingly, with limited brain capacity, I didn’t leave much usable information in my head. As an innovative IT loser, can you use some different solutions to solve this problem? When I think about this, a word pops into my mind: big data.

3. Data crawl, step by step

3.1 the Chinese characters

As an IT diaosi with executive ability, I resolutely started the journey of data crawling. As the cornerstone of Chinese literature, Chinese characters are naturally the first material that comes to my mind. There are a lot of dictionary sites, so I’ve chosen a few professional-looking sites as my data sources (I won’t reveal the exact ones).

After a lot of efforts, we finally saved 7,900 simplified Chinese characters in our database, which contains its pinyin, stroke and basic definition of the three basic columns. Now that we’ve localized our data, are we done and ready to start naming? No, I feel like something’s missing. Let me see…

As you can imagine, yes, the information is too coarse to be useful, but what information is missing?

  • traditional
  • Traditional stroke
  • Whether to use standard Chinese characters
  • Chinese characters structure
  • anagram
  • How to disassemble Chinese characters
  • Chinese character component radical
  • Character five elements attribute…

So, I started a new round of data crawling, this time, there are relatively few sites to refer to, because many sites do not have the information I want. However, this step as a whole is still smooth, just consider the fear of the whole crash of someone else’s server, had to hang in the cloud server crawler, high interval crawl. One night later, the 20,800 Chinese character database was officially created.

3.2 words

The same Chinese character often has different meanings when it appears in different words. Therefore, the data of words is also very important. Compared to the dictionary, there are fewer dictionary-related websites, and I finally crawled 353,000 pieces of data.

The data content of the phrase mainly includes:

  • The phrase of Chinese characters
  • The phrase pinyin
  • paraphrase
  • synonyms
  • antonyms
  • Emotional color
  • Degree of use…

3.3 idiom

Idioms are the stereotyped words in The Vocabulary of Chinese characters. They are widely used and are a feature of Traditional Chinese culture. They are catchy to read and often have deep meaning. Therefore, idioms and Xiehouyu cannot be missed. After simple processing such as weight discharge, a total of 2W+ data is obtained.

The data content of idioms mainly includes:

  • The idiom of Chinese characters
  • Idioms pinyin
  • paraphrase
  • synonyms
  • antonyms
  • allusion
  • Approximate date of birth
  • Emotional color
  • Degree of use…

So far, everything is fine. What else do I need to do?

Yes, that’s it: poetry

3.4 poetry

When it comes to poetry, your first reaction may be 300 poems of tang Dynasty. It is understandable that tang poetry is indeed a pearl in the treasure house of Chinese culture and has exerted a profound influence on Chinese and even world culture. However, there are far more Chinese poems than tang poems, and the number of them is far more than 300. I have listed them roughly according to the dynasties as follows:

  • Pre-qin poetry (such as the famous Book of Songs, ci of chu)
  • Poems of the Han Dynasty (such as 19 Poems of the Han Yuefu and ancient Poems)
  • Poetry of wei, Jin and Southern and Northern Dynasties (cao Cao, Tao Yuanming, etc.)
  • The tang dynasty
  • Song lyrics
  • yuanqu
  • In the qing dynasty poetry
  • Modern poetry

According to incomplete collection, I actually got 8000+ poems and articles, which is really a bit unexpected.

3.5 Ancient and modern celebrities and common names

This data should be we did not think of it!

The main reason to crawl these data is to solve the problem of duplicate names. The same name is a very embarrassing thing, such as now many people called son han, Purple han, Purple Xuan, son xuan and so on, when the teacher called the name, several people may stand up. So I’ve compiled a list of names that have been used particularly frequently in recent years, so I can avoid them later.

In addition to this situation, there is another kind of name repetition that can also cause embarrassment: naming ancient celebrities.

Having the same name as an ancient celebrity can easily lead to teasing from friends, especially when the ancient person with the same name has a negative image. For example, I have a friend named Zhao Gao, who has been troubled by names for a long time.

The collection of ancient celebrities is relatively troublesome because there are few such collections of names. Fortunately, through a certain degree of various lists, as well as other ancient lists, modern and contemporary elite figures in various fields, a total of about 50 million celebrities were collected.

4 reality and ideal, adhere to or give up

4.1 Data in hand, the world I have

The data presented above is actually only a part of the data COLLECTED by me. I won’t go into the rest, because collecting data is a tedious, time-consuming task with little technical skill.

After about two months of intermittent collection, we finally collected and sorted out all the data we wanted. Is it time to make a big splash?

Yeah, I think I’m ready to go big.

4.2 What makes a good name

As the data came in and I was ready to start, I had an urgent question: What makes a good name?

This problem is not clear, as the developer does not have requirements documentation, the next step is completely impossible. But right now I don’t need anyone to help me, so I have to do it myself. When you calm down and think about it, it seems that you can start from the following aspects:

  • The glyphs of names
  • The pronunciation of a name
  • Definition of name
  • Does the name fit the character eight
  • The name is three and five
  • Whether the name conflicts with the zodiac

4.3 Rules, rules?

There are several starting points mentioned above, but the specific rules need to be refined and understood, and then broken down one by one.

Taking the shape as an example, we can extend the relevant knowledge, such as radicals, number of strokes, left and right structure or up and down structure, and how to disassemble Chinese characters.

Further analysis, the number of strokes determines the simplicity of Chinese characters. Too many strokes of names will cause certain writing obstacles for children. Too few strokes will make the name look thin. Similarly, the structure of Chinese characters and pinyin, in different combinations, will have different effects. Therefore, how to combine Chinese characters reasonably, form the optimal scheme, and finally regularize them, this is a thorny problem. To solve the problem, the hair fell all over the floor again.

As the layers of rules are broken down, the overall rules of naming seem to become more and more complex.

Of course, the knowledge related to words and sounds and glyphs is relatively simple; More difficult is: the meaning of the name, as well as the eight characters like to use god to calculate, three to five cases of evaluation, zodiac preferences and other more general or metaphysical things.

So step by step, here finally have the idea of giving up. A search on the Internet, all kinds of fortune-telling masters, naming masters, look very authoritative, not only all kinds of promises, but also often amazing discount, the original price of 1888, discounted price only 188, or even lower. Wouldn’t it be better to solve the problem directly, as they say, with tens of hundreds of dollars? Holding this mentality, I consulted a few common-sense, the result makes me very disappointed.

I don’t care about the overall quality of these masters, but I, a half-fledged apprentice, have found a number of pretenders.

5. Keep your nose to the grindstone

5.1 The eight characters like to be calculated by god

Like to use god is the biggest difficulty, but also the most important point for most Chinese naming professionals. I spent a lot of time trying to understand the meanings of these terms, the various calculations of time, and the connection between liking god and names.

The process is even more complicated, but the result is very simple. Why is it easy? Because at the end of the day, it’s all about math.

For example, we determine the use of god is often through the true solar time, and the difference between the true solar time and Beijing time, can be transformed by the longitude of the birthplace, the specific formula we can search on the Internet.

For another example, when we decide to use god, we will arrange them by four columns and eight characters. They are year dry year branch, month dry month branch, day dry day branch, and hour dry time branch. At first glance, there’s no clue what to do, but if you think about it mathematically, it’s not that complicated.

Heavenly stem: a, b, C, D, e, ji, geng, xin, ren, deci

Ground branches: Zi, Chou, Yin, MAO, Chen, si, Wu, Wei, Shen, you, Xu, Hai

If you use the brute force method, that’s 10 to the fourth times 12 to the fourth, 207.36 million results. So it doesn’t seem so mysterious.

5.1 Three to five

After understanding the above calculation, three to five seems to become more simple.

The calculation of three to five squares, mainly through the combination of strokes, to define the name of good or evil. Note: Strokes generally refer to strokes of traditional characters, not simplified characters.

In the same way, there are ninety-nine and eighty-one cases in the five cases, and 125 good or ill luck in the three cases. Most Chinese names are three characters, and the strokes of each character are basically no more than 36, so let’s calculate: 36 * 36 * 36 = 46656

In this way, three to five squares is not complicated, and strokes are familiar and easy to understand. Most of the name scoring on the market, evaluation software is basically based on this to achieve; So for this kind of software, just look at it, don’t take it seriously.

5.1 Zodiac happy taboo

Chinese zodiac, including the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, chicken, dog, pig, they are representatives of the twelve earthly branches visualization, namely (rat), ugly (cows), Yin (tiger), frame (rabbit), Chen (dragon) and the third (snake), lunch (horse), not (sheep), “(monkey), unitary (chicken), a (dog)), hai (pigs).

Since the zodiac corresponds to specific animals, it naturally gives them their preferences and taboos; And they correspond with the twelve earth branches one by one, and naturally have their own attributes. As a result, people tend to take these factors into account when choosing names.

For example, babies born in the year of chicken often do not take the words “dog”, “dog” or “dog” because it is known that chickens and dogs are restless. Chickens and dogs are difficult to get along with each other. These usages are straightforward and easy to understand, and the rules are also simple to achieve the purpose by disassembling the glyph.

6. It lasts for half a year and finally comes to fruition

It took me nearly half a year to collect and sort out these materials. Although it didn’t seem to produce much, in fact, it brought me a lot of harvest. Although the name is simply a few words, but it is also an epitome of our Chinese culture, parents of the next generation of a hope, but also our generation of the next generation full of love.

The result is not the final name, but what the journey tells us about Chinese naming culture.

7. Can you generalize

You may think I’m here to sell apps or small programs, but I’m not. At that time, I did have the idea of making APP and small program, but I was busy with my work and had already chosen the name of my child, so I didn’t have much motivation to continue studying.

Now the second child is preparing again, so turn it over and summarize.

8. Afterword.

In the past two years, relatives and friends around me have entrusted me to help name, which has also become a small hobby of mine. So, if you dig friends have name needs, and trust me, you can ask me for help, rest assured, absolutely free!

If you are interested in my data, you can also chat privately on wechat, but for copyright reasons, I don’t publicize it.

Below is my wechat QR code, if you need to verify, please fill in: Digifriend name