It essentially means family name and refers to the two sources of ancient Chinese surnames, xing or the name of the ancestral clan, and shi, meaning the name of the family lineage. Xingshi is the Chinese translation of the surname or last name. Even learning just the top 20 will be very useful. A Chinese name begins with the family name as the surname, followed by the given name. Learning these surname characters will also help you to remember the names of Chinese people you meet, as the name will be more familiar to you. If you see a group of 2 or 3 characters and the first character is one of these surnames, even if you don’t know the other characters, you can recognize that it is a person’s name and continue reading without wasting time to look up the meaning. Learning the common Chinese surnames can be very helpful when you are reading texts. Consider yourself lucky that you are learning Chinese! In total, the US has over 6 million surnames.
In the US, there are well over 150,000 surnames that are held by more than 100 people. For example, the total number of surnames (of native Chinese people) in China is just over 4,000. The list of Chinese family names or surnames is much shorter than in other cultures.
