Why did I pick “mawode.com” for my domain name? It goes back to when I visited my friends Jonathan and Chyun in Taipei back in 1998. While I was there they decided I needed to have a proper Chinese name. Most Chinese names are 3 syllables (think Mao Tse-tung, Sun Yat-Sen, and Yo-Yo Ma) and that’s what they were trying to come up with. After agonizing over this for several days, they finally came up with 馬沃德, which is written in Pinyin as Mǎ Wò-Dé. I strung them together to come up with “Mawode”.

In Chinese the usual practice is to say the surname first, so Mǎ is my “last name” and Wò-Dé is my “first name”. Mǎ means “horse”, and is a very common Chinese surname. It’s the same last name as Yo-Yo Ma (although he follows Western practice and puts it at the end). The character 馬 is supposed to be a stylized picture of a horse. If you look closely you can make out the 4 legs at the bottom.

They picked Mǎ because it was the first two letters of “Mankowski”. They tried to do the same thing with “Walt”, but couldn’t get it quite right. Although there are several different meanings for “wa” depending on the tone, none of them really worked for a name. As for the “lt”, well, Chinese doesn’t really have the same “l” sound we have in English, so that was never going to work out, either. They decided on “wò”, meaning “fertile” or “rich”, and “dé”, meaning “morality” or “virtue”. When you say the two syllables together, it sounds pretty close to “Walt”!