Chinese Kinship Calculator

Runs locallyInput stays in your browserFree, no sign-up

Chinese kinship terms are famously hard because three axes intersect: the paternal versus maternal line (your father's brother is not called the same as your mother's brother), seniority (elder versus younger), and gender. Every relationship chain is a path starting from you: each link is a branching decision, and only the full path lands on the correct term — guessing any step in between gets it wrong. This tool ships with the open-source relationship.js kinship library and resolves your chain link by link across a kinship graph. Take father's elder brother: it first finds the father node, then takes the elder-brother branch, landing on 伯父 (bofu). The I-am-male-or-female setting matters twice: some branches split by gender, and the reverse lookup, what they call you back, depends on your gender too.

There are four typical uses. First, Chinese New Year: you walk into a house full of relatives, so you type mother's elder sister's son beforehand and greet your 表哥 (biaoge) by the right title instead of asking your parents on the spot. Second, weddings: the groom's side throws father's younger sister's husband at you — 姑父 (gufu), matched in a second, no awkward silence. Third, teaching kids: children constantly mix up paternal and maternal cousins; typing the chain shows the answer and teaches the patrilineal versus matrilineal distinction along the way. Fourth, writing: a wrong generation title stands out in a family history or memoir, so check before it goes on the page.

Edge cases deserve honesty. One chain can have several correct answers: mother's elder brother's son may be an elder or younger cousin, and the chain carries no age information to decide seniority — the tool lists every valid candidate instead of guessing one for you. Regional speech differs: in northern China people colloquially call father's elder brother daye, while the tool returns the standard written term used across the country; the standard term is always safe in formal settings, and daily speech follows local habit. Chains can run as long as you like, but results beyond five or six links are rarely needed in daily life, so treat them as reference. Unrecognized input, such as typos or dialect words, gets a clear error message rather than a made-up answer.

The page also does a reverse lookup: after finding that father's father is 爷爷 (yeye, grandpa), it shows what grandpa calls you back, for example 孙子 (sunzi, grandson), so return greetings land correctly. All computation happens locally in your browser: the kinship library loads with the page, your input is never uploaded or stored, and the tool keeps working offline once loaded.