Jin - Name Meaning and Popularity -

Meaning of Jin

As a male given name, Jin originates from the Chinese logograph 金 (jīn in Mandarin, pronounced /tʃin/) and parallel hanja characters in Korean such as 珍 or 眞 (진, pronounced /tɕin/), carrying denotations of “gold,” “precious,” “authentic,” or “true.” In both Sino-Mandarin and Sino-Korean onomastic systems, the name functions as a single-syllable appellative that encapsulates metallic and abstract semantic fields within a compact morpheme. Phonologically, Jin consists of an initial voiceless affricate [t͡ʃ] or alveolo-palatal [t͡ɕ] followed by a high front vowel [i] and a nasal coda [n], yielding a phoneme sequence that traverses diverse phonotactic inventories with minimal adjustment. In the United States, its recorded frequency has remained moderate, with annual occurrences varying from as few as eight infants in the early 1980s to peaks of 65 in 2023 (ranked 864th) and 51 in 2024 (873rd), reflecting oscillations between positions in the 600s and 800s over the past four decades. This longitudinal data indicates a sustained, if niche, presence within an Anglo-American naming landscape, driven by both diaspora heritage considerations and the name’s concise phonetic structure.