The paper introduces some traditional Chinese rules concerning personal naming, especially the regulations on lexical items to be avoided in personal names, and analyzes in some more detail the problem of so-called 'bad names'. The authoress discusses 103 different lexical items used for 215 given names or their parts and considered by some Chinese and Western scholars as 'bad names', i.e. being inelegant, unpleasant, and depreciating or even scolding their bearers. The fundamental idea of which 'bad names' have grown up, namely the protection of persons from evil powers, fell into oblivion, and such names are usually treated as improper and formed against the traditional Chinese rules of name-giving.