Given name & surname · Chinese · Japanese
海
“foggy; dark; sullen; menacing; thunder”
海 is a surname from Proto-Sino-Tibetan. It is used in Chinese and Japanese.
Chinese and JapaneseWritten in Chinese characters script. In English: Umi.
Meaning & origin
What it means
海 goes back to Proto-Sino-Tibetan *muːŋ ~ r/s-muːk, meaning “foggy; dark; sullen; menacing; thunder.”
Adapted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0)
How it developed
From Proto-Sino-Tibetan *muːŋ ~ r/s-muːk (“foggy; dark; sullen; menacing; thunder”), from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *m̥əq.
Adapted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0)
海’s family of names
In Japanese usage, 海 can be written in the Roman alphabet as Umi.
Inner ring: spellings · outer: across languages.
Spellings & scripts 1
The same name written differently, including transliterations into other scripts.
Across languages 1
Equivalents and cognates in other languages, plus older forms it grew from.
People named 海
- Kai ShibatoJapanese association football playerborn 1995
- Wang HaiChinese air force general (1926-2020)
- Zhang HaidiChinese writer, politician with physical disabilityborn 1955
- Qian HaiyueChinese historian1901–1968
- Kai Uedabaseball player (1996-)
Listed by how widely each person is written about, which says nothing about the name itself.
Similar names
If you love 海, these share its style, era, origin or sound, from outside its own family.