The naming standard invented by Zhu Yuanzhang: descendants of the Ming royal family, which is still in use today.

Many people know that Zhu Yuanzhang was the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, but they may not know that Zhu Yuanzhang invented a naming rule, which has been in use for more than 700 years and has been in use ever since. Before talking about this naming rule, let's take a look at Zhu Yuanzhang's name.

Zhu Yuanzhang was not called Zhu Yuanzhang at first, but Zhu Chongba. Why is it called Zhu Chongba? This is related to the naming policy of the Yuan Dynasty. According to the Yuan Dynasty, ordinary people can't take official names, but can only add them up according to ranking or parents' age.

For example, Zhu Yuanzhang's great grandfather's name is 49, which should be the age when his parents were born. And Zhu Yuanzhang's grandfather is called the first day, which is based on seniority. Zhu Yuanzhang's father is Zhu, that is, at this age. Zhu Yuanzhang arrived and became Zhu Chongba according to his generation. Another example is Zhu Yuanzhang's opponent Zhang Shicheng, formerly known as Zhang.

Later, Zhu Yuanzhang thought that this heavy eight was too rustic and unpleasant to listen to, so he changed his name to Zhu Yuanzhang. This meaning is very clear, it is Zhang's. He did succeed. He destroyed the Yuan Dynasty and became emperor. As for naming, Zhu Yuanzhang felt that it was necessary to give future generations a good name, and future generations could not be so heavy. So he systematically arranged for a man named Dafa. The name is two words, the first word is seniority, he carefully arranged a line of words for his grandchildren, and everyone followed this word from now on.

Zhu Youjian, wait.

The advantage of this is that the names are not easy to repeat, and it is not easy for grandchildren and great-grandfathers to have the same names. Now, the seniority is very clear. Unlike Liu Bei's self-proclaimed Zhongshan Wang Jing, whether this is true or not, even Liu Bei himself may not be sure.

Ok, let's talk about the second word in the name. This word is more distinctive. It is based on five elements: Jin Mu, fire, water and earth. This radical must be used in order in words. For example, if the father uses fire as the radical, the son must use local characters as the radical.

This moral is very good, the five elements are intertwined and endless, but it is actually very troublesome, because some radicals have few words, such as soil radicals and gold radicals. Therefore, the Zhujiajian family later created many strange characters, and no one knew them, but Zhujiajian knew them. I won't mention the example of taking words from the five elements. The last word of the emperor's name listed above is the radical of the five elements, but this rule does not apply to the descendants of Ming Taizu's grandnephew King Jingjiang. To this day, the descendants of Zhu Yuanzhang still use this system to name them.