Tên chữ

In many cases, these names are literary or formal and are less commonly used than their vernacular counterparts.

The name is sometimes called Địa danh chi Hán văn (地名之漢文).

[2][3][4] It is used in contrast to the tên Nôm (𠸛喃), or vernacular name, which are of native Vietnamese origin.

[5][6] In the Red River Delta, the demotic Vietnamese place name often begins with "Kẻ" (仉); for example: Kẻ Mẩy 仉𨊋 (whereas the tên chữ, or Hán Việt name, is Mễ Trì [vi] 米池), Kẻ Cót 仉榾 (formally Yên Quyết 嫣決), Kẻ Vọng 仉望 (Dịch Vọng [vi] 懌望).

Many, if not most city names in Vietnam are Sino-Vietnamese, but some cities also have earlier Nôm names: Major cities with Vietnamese demotic names include: In these cases later Sino-Vietnamese names were derived by local Vietnamese Confucian administrators with homonymic phonetic approximations (Cam Ranh; Cam Linh) or semantic translations (Bến Nghé; Ngưu Chử).