粵
錯 Kept by an outsider — mistakes get fixed in public. Corrections
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 屋 3,167 house, room
Court 閣 1,527 pavilion, tower
Centre 中心 1,249 centre
Mansion 大廈 1,219 big building
Garden 花園 550 flower garden
Tower 塔 508 tower, pagoda
Villa 別墅 417 separate villa
Plaza 廣場 232 broad square
Park 公園 177 public park
Terrace 台 129 platform, terrace
Bay 灣 117 bay
Heights 高 115 high
Lodge 苑 84 garden, estate
Palace 宮 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.
大 daai6 4,664 big
華 waa4 1,039 China; splendid
富 fu3 584 rich, wealthy
金 gam1 503 gold, metal
樂 lok6 440 joy, music
興 hing1 424 flourish, rise
福 fuk1 399 fortune, blessing
龍 lung4 337 dragon
昌 coeng1 308 prosperous, flourishing
發 faat3 282 prosper, emit
隆 lung4 88 abundant, grand
好 hou2 76 good
記 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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