In a study by CAS Institute of Psychology, it was shown that more and more Chinese people like to give their children a unique name. In the study, the team’s average word frequency (used in contemporary Chinese) of the individual characters of the individual name was used as an indicator of the uniqueness of the name: the lower the average word frequency of a name, the higher the name is unique. For example, the uniqueness of “Chen Chen (jun)” is higher than the uniqueness of “Chen Jun” because the word “銞” is used very frequently in modern Chinese. The study randomly selected 580 names of people born between 1950 and 2009, 10 per year. It was found that between 1950 and 2009, the word frequency of Chinese newborn names was decreasing year by year, and more and more uncommon words appeared, indicating that people’s demand for uniqueness is getting higher and higher.
CAS news release, August 20, 2018