Li (surname)

Li is the pinyin and Wade–Giles romanization (spelled Lí, Lǐ, or Lì when pinyin tone diacritics are used) of several distinct Chinese surnames that are written with different characters in Chinese. Li 李 is by far the most common among them, shared by 93 million people in China, and more than 100 million worldwide. It is the second most common Chinese surname behind Wang.

Languages using the Latin alphabet do not distinguish among the different Chinese surnames, rendering them all as Li. In the United States, Li is the 14th most common surname among people of Asian-Pacific Islander descent and the 519th most common surname overall, up from 2,084th in 1990. Li is the 3rd most common Chinese surname in the Canadian province of Ontario.

List of surnames romanized as Li or Lee

Lee

Lee may refer to:

People

Given name

Surname

Geography

Great Britain

United States of America

Li (surname 李)

Li (Chinese: 李; pinyin: Lǐ) is the second most common surname in China, behind only Wang. It is also one of the most common surnames in the world, shared by 93 million people in China, and more than 100 million worldwide. It is the fourth name listed in the Song dynasty classic text Hundred Family Surnames. According to the Sixth National Population Census of the People's Republic of China, Li takes back the number one surname in China with a population of 95,300,000 (7.94％).

The name is pronounced as "Lei" in Cantonese, but is often spelled as Lee in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and many other overseas Chinese communities. In Macau, it is also spelled as Lei. In Indonesia it is commonly spelled as Lie.

The common Korean surname, Lee (also romanized as Yi, Ri, or Rhee), and the Vietnamese surname, Lý, are both derived from Li and are historically written with the same Chinese character, 李. The character also means "plum" or "plum tree".

According to tradition, the Li surname originated from the title Dali held by Gao Yao, a legendary minister of the Xia dynasty, and was originally written with the different character, 理. Laozi (Li Er), the founder of Taoism, was the first historical person known to have the surname and is regarded as the founding ancestor of the surname.

Lee (English given name)

Lee is a given name derived from the English surname Lee (which is ultimately from a placename derived from Old English leah "clearing; meadow"). As the surname of Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), the name became popular in the American South after the Civil War, its popularity peaking in 1900 at rank 39 as a masculine name, and in 1955 at rank 182 as a feminine name. The name's popularity declined steadily in the second half of the 20th century, falling below rank 1000 by 1991 as a feminine name, and to 666 as of 2012 as a masculine name. In the later 20th century, it also gained some popularity in the United Kingdom, peaking among the 20 most popular boys' names during the 1970s to 1980s, but it had fallen out of the top 100 by 2001.

Lee is also a hypocoristic form of the given names Ashley, Beverly, Kimberley, and Leslie (all of which are also derived from English placenames containing -leah as a second element; with the possible exception of Leslie, which may be an anglicization of a Gaelic placename).

Sinitic languages

The Sinitic languages, are a family of Sino-Tibetan languages, often synonymous with the group of Chinese varieties. They have frequently been postulated to constitute a primary branch, but this is rejected by an increasing number of researchers. The Bai languages and possible relatives, whose classification is difficult, may also be Sinitic; otherwise Sinitic is equivalent to Chinese, and the term may be used to indicate that the varieties of Chinese are distinct languages rather than dialects of a single language.

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Traditional Chinese characters

Traditional Chinese characters (traditional Chinese: 正體字/繁體字; simplified Chinese: 正体字/繁体字; Pinyin: Zhèngtǐzì/Fántĭzì) are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most commonly the characters in the standardized character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong and Macau or in the Kangxi Dictionary. The modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han Dynasty, and have been more or less stable since the 5th century (during the Southern and Northern Dynasties.) The retronym "traditional Chinese" is used to contrast traditional characters with Simplified Chinese characters, a standardized character set introduced by the government of the People's Republic of China on Mainland China in the 1950s. Traditional Chinese characters are currently used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau; as well as in Overseas Chinese communities outside of Southeast Asia, although the number of printed materials in simplified characters is growing in Australia, USA and Canada, targeting or created by new arrivals from mainland China. Currently, a large number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both sets. In contrast, simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia in official publications. The debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities.

Simplified Chinese characters

Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Xiandai Hanyu Tongyong Zibiao (List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese) for use in mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, it is one of the two standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the People's Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to increase literacy. They are officially used in the People's Republic of China and Singapore.

Traditional Chinese characters are currently used in Hong Kong, Macau, and the Republic of China (Taiwan). While traditional characters can still be read and understood by many mainland Chinese and Singaporeans, these groups generally retain their use of Simplified characters. Overseas Chinese communities generally tend to use traditional characters.

Simplified Chinese characters are officially called in Chinese jiǎnhuàzì (简化字 in simplified form, 簡化字 in traditional form). Colloquially, they are called  jiǎntizì (简体字 / 簡體字). Strictly, the latter refers to simplifications of character "structure" or "body", character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, more complicated forms. On the other hand, jiǎnhuàzì means the modern systematically simplified character set, that (as stated by Mao Zedong in 1952) includes not only structural simplification but also substantial reduction in the total number of standardized Chinese characters.