The surname Mǐ (羋) was originally an onomatopoeia for caprine bleating with the reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation *meʔ.
As recorded by Sima Qian, the family themselves claimed descent from Zhuanxu, a son of the Yellow Emperor in Chinese legend; his grandson Jilian; and Yuxiong, a tutor of King Wen of Zhou in the 11th century BC.
[6] The descendants of particular Chu kings became known by the separate surnames Jing (景), Zhao (昭), and Qu (屈),[7] known collectively as the Sanlü (三閭).
[10] Notable people with this surname: The surname Mí is a variant pronunciation of nǐ (禰), originally the term for the spirit of one's own dead father and then a synonym for spirit tablets and ancestral shrines, all aspects of ancestral veneration connected to traditional conceptions of filial piety.
The surname Mí (糜) is a word for mush used in some dialects to refer to congee and similar forms of cooked rice.