Most frequent Chinese characters appearing in metro station names

May 06, 2025

When I arrive in a new Chinese city, one problem I have is not knowing how to read the names of the metro stations I need to go to. So I scraped a 3,237 station names across 14 cities from Wikipedia to familiarize myself with the most frequent characters.

Plots

There are 3 plots below, which show both the most frequent character and also character combinations. The plots are limited to the top characters that appear the most, but you can see the ranking of all characters in this Google Sheet.

Frequencies of individual characters that occur in at least 25 station names

Frequencies of two-character combinations

Frequencies of 3+ character combinations

Top character frequency differences by city

Code

You can see this Jupyter Notebook for how I:

1. Scraped and parsed the data from Wikipedia
2. Computed character and combination frequencies
3. Got the pinyin for the characters
4. Made the plots!