Chinese kinship calculator. Walk a relationship path — mother, then her elder male cousin, then his son — and it derives the correct 称呼, with the 堂/表, 伯/叔 and 姑/舅/姨 distinctions, in-law forms, both scripts, and what they call you back. Runs entirely in your browser.
Chinese Kinship Calculator (亲戚称谓计算器)
I CALL THEM
Mostly terms of reference: how you speak about them to others. To their face it can differ; someone who married in usually says what their spouse says.
How it was worked out
Common questions
How to use the Chinese Kinship Calculator
Say whether you are male or female
Several terms depend on it. Your husband’s elder brother is 大伯子; your wife’s elder brother is 大舅子 — the same position in the family, a different word. Male is the default; one tap changes it.
Walk the relationship one step at a time
Starting from 我 (me), press through the ten steps — father, mother, elder and younger brother, elder and younger sister, son, daughter, husband, wife — up to six deep. Tap any step in the chain to remove it. Elder and younger brother are separate buttons because that single choice is what decides 伯 from 叔.
Read the card
The large word is the term. Below it are the other script and the pinyin. The badges give the generation, whether the path ran through the father’s or the mother’s side, and whether the relative is 堂 or 表. The last line answers the other half of every family question: what they call you back.
Check the working
The derivation panel opens up each step: where the common ancestor sits, how many generations separate you, and why the answer came out 堂 rather than 表. Where Chinese genuinely has no single word, it says so and gives the descriptive phrase a speaker would actually use — it never invents one. Where a chain has more than one right answer (your father’s son may be you), it lists every one. Where the path is in the six-dialect dataset, Mandarin, Northern, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka and SG-MY forms are listed too.
Why Chinese kinship terms are hard
English gets by with one word, cousin, where Chinese needs eight. Your father’s elder brother is 伯伯; his younger brother is 叔叔 — same generation, same blood, a different word purely because of birth order. Your father’s sister is 姑姑, your mother’s brother 舅舅, your mother’s sister 姨. One generation down, 堂 and 表 split your cousins in two. A single term can encode generation, which side of the family, blood or marriage, relative age within a generation, and whether the surname is shared.
堂 and 表: the rule people get wrong
The usual summary — father’s side is 堂, mother’s side is 表 — is half right and misleads on the other half. The real test is whether the surname carries all the way through: every step from you up to the common ancestor must be to a father, and every step back down to your relative must be to a son. One woman anywhere in that chain breaks the surname, and the relative is 表.
So your father’s brother’s son is 堂哥 or 堂弟 — same surname, same clan line. Your father’s sister’s son is 表哥 or 表弟, still on your father’s side, because your aunt married out and her children took their father’s name. That single step is what this tool checks link by link, and it is exactly what a lookup table tends to blur.
Why it derives instead of looking up
This page used to answer from seventy stored paths. Seventy sounds like a lot until you count: ten basic steps, six deep, is more than 1.1 million chains for each sex — and the one being argued about over dinner is usually not among the stored ones. Now every button press creates a real person in a family graph. To answer, the tool finds the closest ancestor you and your relative share, measures how many generations up and down, notes which links along the way were men and which were women, and derives the term from that structure.
There is a pleasant side effect. Ask for “my son’s mother” and the answer comes back 妻子 — your wife — because that son’s mother and your spouse are the same node in the graph. No lookup table can do that.
What it refuses to pretend it knows
Some relationships have no everyday Chinese word. Your great-grandfather’s elder brother is one: what people actually say is the chain itself, 爸爸的爸爸的爸爸的哥哥. The 《爾雅·釋親》, a classical glossary, does name him 族曾王父, and the tool shows that as a classical term without passing it off as what people say. In these cases the answer is labelled descriptive and you get the phrase itself, rather than a plausible-looking compound nobody uses.
Some chains have more than one right answer. Your father’s son may be you, or an elder or younger brother; your grandfather’s son may be your father, or his elder or younger brother. At each step the family tree cannot say whether this is someone already in the chain, or who among the siblings is older. So the tool lists every reading, with what that person would call you in each case, instead of quietly picking one.
Other answers turn on age rather than genealogy. Whether your uncle’s son is 堂哥 or 堂弟 depends on whether he is older or younger than you, and the family tree cannot say. Both forms are given, with the condition stated. Regional variation is noted only where a dictionary backs it: Taiwan’s Ministry of Education dictionary makes 姑丈 and 姨丈 the headwords, with 姑父 and 姨父 as synonyms. Where no source could be found, nothing is claimed.
Talking about someone, and talking to them
Most answers on the card are terms of reference: the word for talking about a relative to someone else. What you say to their face can differ. Taiwan’s Ministry of Education Taiwanese dictionary says it outright under 大官 (a husband’s father): the word is used when speaking about him, and to his face a wife says what her husband says.
One reality of Chinese families in Singapore and Malaysia
In a Singaporean or Malaysian household the Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka and Mandarin forms often coexist, and which one an elder expects is not settled. The six-dialect comparison is therefore kept: where the chain falls inside the dataset, the Mandarin, Northern, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka and simplified SG-MY forms are listed side by side with pinyin, jyutping and Tâi-lô. The derived term is always available; the dialect detail is a bonus where the dataset reaches.
What separates 堂 from 表 is not “the father’s side” but whether the surname carries all the way through. One woman in the chain and it is 表.
English has one word for cousin; Chinese needs eight
English has one word, cousin. Chinese needs eight.
伯 and 叔 differ only by birth order — father’s elder brother against his younger one.
A mother’s brothers are all 舅舅, elder or younger alike.
堂 means a shared surname; one woman anywhere in the path makes it 表.
The character 外 marks the mother’s line or a daughter’s: 外公, 外婆, 外孙.
A brother’s children are 侄; a sister’s children are 外甥.
Going up, the 《爾雅·釋親》 stops at 高祖, your great-grandfather’s father. The longer lists that circulate (天祖, 烈祖 …) are not in it.
Going down it reaches 雲孫: 曾孫, 玄孫, 來孫, 晜孫, 仍孫, 雲孫. 耳孫 comes from the Han shu (《漢書·惠帝紀》), and Taiwan’s MOE dictionary makes it the eighth generation, the same step as 仍孫.
Someone who marries in normally follows their spouse — your uncle’s wife calls you 侄子 because he does.
This tool computes entirely in your browser; nothing you enter leaves the device.
Frequently asked questions
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He is 表哥 if he is older than you and 表弟 if he is younger. The relative is on your father’s side, but your aunt is in the middle of the chain: she married out and her children took their father’s surname, so the surname breaks and the term is 表 rather than 堂. Your father’s brother’s son, sharing the surname, would be 堂哥 or 堂弟.
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堂 means the surname is shared: every step from you up to the common ancestor is to a father, and every step back down to your relative is to a son. Any woman in that chain breaks the line and the relative becomes 表. This is why the popular summary — father’s side is 堂 — is not quite right: your father’s sister’s children are on your father’s side and are still 表.
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Birth order, and nothing else. Your father’s elder brother is 伯伯 (formally 伯父); his younger brother is 叔叔 (formally 叔父). The blood relationship is identical and the word changes purely on seniority. Their wives follow suit: 伯母 for the elder’s wife, 婶婶 for the younger’s.
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姑姑 is your father’s sister, 舅舅 your mother’s brother, and 姨 your mother’s sister. Each word fixes exactly one position, so they never overlap. Any of your mother’s sisters can be 姨妈: Taiwan’s Ministry of Education dictionary defines 姨媽 as the mother’s sisters with no elder or younger split, and gives 小姨 as the youngest of them. Their husbands are 姨父 and your father’s sister’s husband is 姑父 (that dictionary’s headwords are 姨丈 and 姑丈), and your mother’s brother’s wife is 舅妈.
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Because the family tree cannot settle a question about age. Whether your uncle’s son is 堂哥 or 堂弟 depends on whether he is older or younger than you, and both cases look identical on a pedigree. Where that happens the tool shows both forms with the condition attached, rather than guessing one for you.
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By running the same family graph in the other direction. Every step you press has already created a real person, so the tool simply starts from your relative, targets you, and derives the term again. Seniority flips with it: your younger sister’s husband calls you 大舅子, while your elder sister’s husband calls you 小舅子.
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It means everyday Chinese has no common single word for that relationship, so speakers say the chain itself. Your great-grandfather’s elder brother is one such case: what people actually say is 爸爸的爸爸的爸爸的哥哥. The classical 《爾雅·釋親》 calls him 族曾王父, and the tool shows that as a classical term. It never assembles a plausible-looking compound nobody uses.
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Because it has several. Your father’s son may be you, or an elder or younger brother; your grandfather’s son may be your father, or one of his brothers. A chain of steps cannot say whether a step lands on someone already in it, or who among siblings is older. The tool lists every reading in the working panel, with what that person would call you in each case.
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Not always. Most answers are terms of reference, the word for talking about someone. To their face it can differ: Taiwan’s Ministry of Education Taiwanese dictionary notes under 大官 (a husband’s father) that the word is used when speaking about him, while to his face a wife says what her husband says. Most people who married in do the same.
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Yes. Every term is produced in both scripts at once — the large word on the card follows the script of the page you are reading, and the line beneath gives the other. The conversion uses the tool’s own table covering only kinship characters, so pairs like 侄/姪, 孙/孫, 妈/媽 and 婶/嬸 all come out right.
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Because the dialect dataset covers 70 common chains while the solver covers all of them. When your chain is one the dataset holds, the Mandarin, Northern, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka and SG-MY forms appear side by side; when it is not, the term is still derived, there is simply no dialect row to show.
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Entirely free, with no account and no limit. Everything is computed in your browser, so the relationship chain you build is never sent to a server, and the page keeps working offline once it has loaded.
Method & sources
How it computes
Each step (father, mother, elder or younger brother or sister, husband, wife, son, daughter) adds a person to a family graph; ChineseKinshipKernel finds where you and the target meet and derives the term from generations up and down, lineage (堂/表, 内/外), seniority and sex. Chains with more than one valid reading list every answer; relations with no everyday word are given as a descriptive chain.
What this tool implements
- Kroeber AL. Process in the Chinese Kinship System. American Anthropologist 1933;35(1):151-157. doi:10.1525/aa.1933.35.1.02a00150
- Feng Han-yi. The Chinese Kinship System. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 1937;2(2):141-275
- Chao Yuen Ren. Chinese Terms of Address. Language 1956;32(1):217-241. doi:10.2307/410666
- 《爾雅·釋親》 — the classical nine-generation ascent and descent ladders
- CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) and English Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) — per-term validation
- Checked 2026-10-19 against the 《爾雅·釋親》 text: the ascent ends at 髙祖王父 (no 天祖 or 烈祖, as the page says), the descent runs 曾孫, 玄孫, 來孫, 晜孫, 仍孫, 雲孫, and 族曾王父 is the father's 從祖祖父. 耳孫 is attested in 《漢書·惠帝紀》, and the Ministry of Education dictionary defines it as 八世孫 (玄孫的曾孫), the 仍孫 generation, as the page says.
Sources
- 《爾雅·釋親》, Chinese Wikisource text. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/爾雅
- 班固《漢書》卷二〈惠帝紀〉, Chinese Wikisource text. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/漢書/卷002
- Ministry of Education (Taiwan). 《重編國語辭典修訂本》, entries 姑婆, 舅公, 連襟, 妯娌, 親家, 姑丈, 姨丈, 耳孫 — read through the g0v moedict API. https://www.moedict.tw/
Abridged — the full review record for this tool runs longer than the list above.
Pick up where you left off
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