Tên chữ

The địa danh (Chinese: 地名) variant of a Vietnamese place is the official Chinese-character name historically used by the Sinophere's administration.

The name is sometimes called Địa-danh chi Hán-văn.

It is used in contrast to the tên nôm, or vernacular name, written in locally derived Sino-Vietnamese characters unique to transcribe non-Sinic Vietnamese words. In the Red River Delta, the demotic Vietnamese place name often begins with "Kẻ" for example: Kẻ Mẩy (whereas the tên chữ, or Hán Việt name, is Mễ Trì), Kẻ Cót (formally Yên Quyết), Kẻ Vọng (Dịch Vọng).

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). Some however are completely unrelated (Sông Cầu: Xuân Đài).

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