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The collection

英文

Hong Kong English
jing1 man4*2

English words carrying Cantonese meanings — and the characters that turn up in twenty thousand building names.

How many Hong Kong Mansions are not mansions
Whole-word matches in the English name field of every building on the government register. Mansion is not a rare, grand word here — it is ordinary vocabulary for a block.
Building 大廈 3,867 big building
House 3,167 house, room
Court 1,527 pavilion, tower
Centre 中心 1,249 centre
Mansion 大廈 1,219 big building
Garden 花園 550 flower garden
Tower 508 tower, pagoda
Villa 別墅 417 separate villa
Plaza 廣場 232 broad square
Park 公園 177 public park
Terrace 129 platform, terrace
Bay 117 bay
Heights 115 high
Lodge 84 garden, estate
Palace 15 palace
Universe & method

Universe. Rating and Valuation Department 'Names of Buildings' — urban_print.xls (12,396 rows) + nt_print.xls (7,660 rows) — All sheets, 20,056 building records (19,211 with Chinese name), print dated 2026-07-24, obtained 2026-08-26 at canonical/projects/canto.institute/{urban,nt}_print.xls; also at https://data.gov.hk/en-data/dataset/hk-rvd-tsinfo_rvd-names-of-buildings

Method. case-insensitive whole-word match (\bWORD\b) on the English name field (English field extracted via non-CJK lines from the bilingual Name cell)

A 'Mansion' in Hong Kong renders 大廈, big building, and the register does not distinguish a tower from a walk-up tenement. The English word kept its spelling and took the Chinese word's scope.
Table view Download CSV →
The characters Hong Kong builds with
Single-character matches in the Chinese name field of the same register. Unremarkable words in Cantonese; at this density, absurd in English translation.
daai6 4,664 big
waa4 1,039 China; splendid
fu3 584 rich, wealthy
gam1 503 gold, metal
lok6 440 joy, music
hing1 424 flourish, rise
fuk1 399 fortune, blessing
lung4 337 dragon
coeng1 308 prosperous, flourishing
faat3 282 prosper, emit
lung4 88 abundant, grand
hou2 76 good
gei3 25 mark, record
Universe & method

Universe. Rating and Valuation Department 'Names of Buildings' — urban_print.xls (12,396 rows) + nt_print.xls (7,660 rows) — All sheets, 20,056 building records (19,211 with Chinese name), print dated 2026-07-24, obtained 2026-08-26 at canonical/projects/canto.institute/{urban,nt}_print.xls; also published as XLS/XML at https://data.gov.hk/en-data/dataset/hk-rvd-tsinfo_rvd-names-of-buildings

Method. exact substring match for the single hanzi in the Chinese name field (Chinese field extracted via CJK Unicode range detection from the bilingual Name of Building cell)

金 gold appears in 503 building names. Rendered into English as Gold, Golden or Kam, it reads as gaudy — but 金 is unmarked in Cantonese, and the density is the whole point.
Table view Download CSV →

Notes from the collection

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