The Five Grids of a Name

The Five Grids method is the most widely used system in East Asian name reading. It was systematised in Japan by Kumasaki Kenou in the early twentieth century and travelled back into the Chinese-speaking world from there. It turns the stroke counts of a name into five numbers and reads them by numerology.

How the five grids are computed

First a prerequisite: strokes are counted the Kangxi dictionary way, not by modern simplified forms. Get that wrong and everything after it is wrong.

Take 王大明 — Wang 4 strokes, Da 3, Ming 8:

Heaven = the family name. A one-character surname adds a notional 1; a two-character surname is simply summed. → 4 + 1 = 5
Personality = last character of the surname + first of the given name. → 4 + 3 = 7
Earth = the given name. One character adds 1; two are summed. → 3 + 8 = 11
Outer = Heaven + Earth − Personality. → 5 + 11 − 7 = 9
Total = every stroke added. → 4 + 3 + 8 = 15

There is a self-check worth knowing: a one-character surname with a one-character given name always gives an Outer grid of exactly 2. Substitute into the formula — Heaven is surname + 1, Earth is name + 1, Personality is surname + name, and the subtraction leaves 2. Anything else means a step went wrong.

What each grid governs

Heaven — ancestral luck, inherited from the surname. Not read for fortune on its own; it only takes part in the Three Powers
Personality — the main reading, the heaviest of the five, governing character and middle life
Earth — early life, family and close relationships
Outer — social life and outside circumstances
Total — later life, the sum of a lifetime

This site maps them onto the six readings: Personality carries career and mind, Earth carries love and health, Outer carries people, Total carries wealth.

Numerology values and their elements

Each grid is reduced into the range 1–81 (subtract 80 if it goes over) and read against the 81 numerology values. 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 15 and 16 are among the auspicious ones; 2, 4, 9, 10, 12 and 14 among the inauspicious.

Numbers carry elements too, taken from the last digit: 1 and 2 are Wood, 3 and 4 Fire, 5 and 6 Earth, 7 and 8 Metal, 9 and 0 Water. So a Personality of 7 is Metal and a Total of 15 is Earth.

The Three Powers

The elements of Heaven, Personality and Earth read in sequence form the Three Powers. A run of generation or of matching elements is auspicious; a control relation in the middle is not.

For 王大明 the sequence is Earth → Metal → Wood. Earth generates Metal, which is smooth; Metal controls Wood, which is not — so the configuration reads mixed.

Joining the name to the chart

This is the step most online tools skip. The Five Grids alone can only say whether a name's numbers are good. But the same name against different charts can give opposite conclusions.

This site joins them at one question: does the name's governing element — the Personality grid — supply the element the chart needs? If it does, the name counts in your favour; if it lands on the element the chart already has too much of, it counts against. A name is a constant while days are variables, so its weight is deliberately held below that of the day: a poorly numbered name pulls the baseline down a little, it does not fix every day of the year at one level.

Enter a name to see the full grid and that judgement.