Name Test · Health of Name & BaZi

What the four dimensions measure

A name is not reduced to one grand total; it is read along four lines. Meaning uses Shuowen Jiezi and standard dictionary glosses, asking whether the original and extended senses are still positive today. Sound checks tone pattern, initials and finals, and whether the syllables jam when run together — with particular attention to the join with the surname. Elements counts the element attributed to each character and asks whether it matches the favourable direction of the chart. Strokes counts total and per-character strokes, as an indicator of writing burden and visual balance.

How to read the score

The score is the output of rules, not a verdict. The same name scores differently against different charts, so look first at which dimension dragged it down before deciding to change anything. A low stroke score alone does not mean the name is bad; a clear mismatch in sound or elements is worth acting on.

How well the name fits the chart

This asks whether the elements of the name's characters fall on the favourable direction of the chart. Beware the common shortcut of adding whatever the chart lacks: the missing element is not necessarily the favourable one. For the reasoning, see Five Elements and BaZi (in Chinese). If a birthplace is given, the chart is corrected to True Solar Time before the comparison.

What the zodiac receipt is

Under the zodiac rows in the result sits a small block we call the zodiac receipt. It lays out the four fields belonging to the year layer side by side: the year pillar, the element of its heavenly stem, the nayin, and the folk name. Take 2026: the year pillar is bing-wu, its stem bing is fire, so the year is called fire horse; its nayin is heavenly river water, known in folk usage as the travelling horse. Whether a character root suits the zodiac depends on which of these rows you are reading — not on a vague claim that you were born in the year of the horse.

The rows are separate because stem elements and nayin are independent systems that can contradict each other. Names like fire horse, metal tiger and wood rat come from the ten heavenly stems — jia and yi are wood, bing and ding fire, wu and ji earth, geng and xin metal, ren and gui water — which can be derived directly. Nayin comes from a lookup table of the sixty-year cycle, paired two years at a time into thirty entries. The clearest case is a geng-yin year: the stem geng is metal, so it is called a metal tiger, yet its nayin is pine and cypress wood — one metal, one wood, each saying something different. Ask what element a tiger year is and the answer has to start with which system and which year.

Treat the folk-name column on its own. Labels like tiger of the mountain forest or rabbit gazing at the moon have no single early source, and the versions differ between books. Read them as flavour, not as conclusion. The full sixty-row table — twelve zodiac animals against five stem-branch pairs each — is in the sixty-year cycle table (in Chinese).

One more case produces a discrepancy: a birth after the start of spring but before Lunar New Year. The year pillar turns over at lichun, while the folk zodiac still counts the previous year, so for those days the two disagree. The receipt block flags it explicitly and states which convention this site uses.

Why nothing is uploaded

Every calculation runs in your browser. Names, birth times and birthplaces are never sent to a server, and there are no accounts. Saved names live in your browser's local storage, so clearing site data will lose them. This matches what the privacy policy says, without exception.