2026 Baby Girl Names in China: Trending Characters and Their Meanings

A family looking for a name for a girl born in China in 2026, whether Chinese or a foreign family living there, will not find a list of "this year's most popular names". No such list exists for 2026. What is more, China's nationwide official name report stops at 2021 births: the Household Registration Administration Research Center of the Ministry of Public Security published its 《2021 National Name Report》 in January 2022, and we found no national report for 2022–2025.

Only two newer signals exist, and both are local: the 2024 list for Sichuan province and the 2025 number one for the city of Chengdu. They describe that province and that city, not China as a whole. This article makes no forecast; it follows the characters inside the names.

Why look for the trend in characters?

A Chinese given name takes its meaning from its hanzi characters. Every name on these lists has two characters, and parents choose and combine them one by one. The official count follows the written form, too: 一诺 and 依诺, both read Yinuo, count as separate names, which is why they took first and second place separately in 2020. A character can rise while being spread over several different names. So before counting names, we counted characters.

Character counter: how often did each appear in three lists?

The figures are not numbers of babies. They show how many of that list's top 10 girls' names contain the character. The first two columns cover all of China; the last covers Sichuan province only.

汐 (xi): a wave across all three lists

汐 means "evening tide". It carries the water radical (氵) and, together with 潮 for the morning tide, forms the word 潮汐, "tide". The 2021 report listed it among the characters rising compared with 2020, alongside 芮, 霖 and 航. That same year 若汐 (Ruoxi) entered the top 10 straight at number one; according to the report, about 18,000 baby girls were given the name.

The trail continues in local data. Sichuan's 2024 list has 汐玥 (Xiyue, 1,856 babies) at number one and 汐瑶 (Xiyao) at number five. In Chengdu, the name most often given to girls in 2025 was 锦汐 (Jinxi; 锦 means "brocade"); it was not in Sichuan's 2024 top 10. The second character of 汐玥, 玥, also has a history: the 2020 report showed it among the characters rising compared with 2019.

沐 (mu): boys nationally, girls in Sichuan

沐 means "to bathe, to cleanse" and, figuratively, "to receive favour". It was absent from the national girls' top 10 in both 2020 and 2021. Yet in the 2021 report it was one of the five characters used most often in newborns' names, and the number one boys' name was 沐宸. In Sichuan's 2024 girls' list it appears in two names: 沐瑶 (2nd) and 沐妍 (6th). There is no national data to show whether this has spread across the country.

The steady ones and the quieter ones

欣怡 (Xinyi) and 雨桐 (Yutong) appear in all three lists: the national top 10 of 2020 and 2021 and Sichuan's 2024 top 10. By contrast, 诺 and 语, each present in two national top-10 names in both years, do not appear at all in Sichuan's 2024 top 10. That is one province's picture and not enough to draw conclusions for the whole country.

The last national list: three groups in 2021

We set the 2020 and 2021 lists side by side and worked out each name's movement by script. "—" means the name was not in the 2020 top 10. The Arabic column is a phonetic rendering, explained below.

The names that slipped tell a story too: 欣怡 fell from 3rd to 8th and 语桐 from 5th to 9th, while 欣妍, 可欣 and 梦瑶 were not in the 2021 top 10. 一诺 dropped just one place, as 若汐 took the top spot. Because the national report gives only the top 10 in text, the number of babies for these names is not known.

The Abjad window: names added up syllable by syllable

None of these names is of Arabic origin, and none has an established Arabic spelling. The Arabic forms in the tables are a phonetic rendering of the kind the Arabic press uses for Chinese names, and the Abjad value was calculated from those letters. The rendering carries neither tones nor characters: the value belongs to the sound, not to the character.

In this rendering each syllable is written like a separate word, so a name's value is the sum of its syllables. The last two columns of the character counter show exactly that. Whatever name it appears in, 汐 brings شي, that is 310: 若汐 = رو (206) + شي (310) = 516; 语汐 = يو (16) + شي (310) = 326. The difference comes from the character beside it.

• Four characters, one syllable: in the 2021 top 10, 一, 依, 艺 and 苡 are four different characters, but all are read yi; in Arabic all four are يي, worth 20.
• Heavy and light syllables: 桐 (tong, تونغ) is worth 1456 on its own, because ghayn (غ), which renders the "-ng" sound, is 1000; that is why a name with 桐 runs to four digits (雨桐 and 语桐 are 1472). The lightest syllable in the table is 语 (يو) at 16, and the lowest total in the 2021 top 10 is 苡沫 (يي مو) at 66.
• First letter and element: the syllables 汐 (ش), 沐 (م), 欣 (ش) and 涵 (ه) begin with a letter of the fire group; 瑶, 怡, 桐, 诺 and 语 begin with a letter of the air group (ي, ت, ن). In the 2021 national top 10, 8 names began with an air letter, while 汐 and 沐, prominent in Sichuan, are syllables that begin with a fire letter. This is an observation, not an explanation of the trend. The classification is the classical one used in the site's reports; some authors classify differently.

We have no verified Arabic spelling on record for 汐玥, 汐瑶, 沐瑶 or 锦汐 from the Sichuan and Chengdu lists, so we give no Abjad value for them.

So are these numbers enough to decide? No. In the Abjad tradition a name's value on its own is not an analysis; the real question is how that value fits with the mother's and father's names. A child's Yıldızname comes from the total of the child's own name and the mother's name. For a Chinese name the first step is clear: fix the Arabic spelling from the start. The one-character difference between 一诺 and 依诺 changes the meaning in Chinese, but not the Abjad value.

Note: there is no data for 2026, and no national report was found for the years after 2021. The Sichuan and Chengdu data cover only that province and that city. This article contains no ranking or numerical forecast. Character meanings are based on dictionary definitions; Abjad interpretations reflect a traditional perspective and offer no certain result or guarantee.

Source: Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China, Household Registration Administration Research Center, 《2021 National Name Report》 (24 January 2022) and the 2020 report (8 February 2021); Sichuan Provincial Public Security Department, 2024 newborn names; Chengdu Public Security Bureau (via 成都发布), 2025. The data refer to newborns entered in the police household register. The national report publishes only the top 10 names, with a count given only for the name in first place.