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Japan Know How

Bradley in Japanese

Bradley in Japanese

The name Bradley is written ブラッドリー in Japanese.

ブラッドリー

bu-ra-ddo-rī

6 morae

The rules would have got this wrong. Run Bradley through pronunciation rules and you get ブラドリー. The spelling actually used in Japanese is ブラッドリー. That gap is why this list was checked by hand rather than generated.

Syllable by syllable

Bradley is 7 letters in English and 6 beats in Japanese. The two counts are close because Bradley is already built from syllables Japanese can take almost unchanged.

  1. ブbu
  2. ラra
  3. ッa held beat
  4. ドdo
  5. リーrī

The small ッ has no sound of its own. It holds the beat and doubles the consonant after it, which is why Bradley takes longer to say in Japanese than an English speaker expects. The bar ー stretches the vowel before it across a second beat. It is not decoration: drop it and Bradley becomes a different word in Japanese.

Written vertically

ブラッドリー

Vertical writing runs top to bottom, and columns run right to left. You will meet it on book spines, shop curtains, formal letters and name cards. One character in Bradley changes shape here: the long vowel bar lies down as a dash horizontally and stands upright vertically. It is the same mark, turned with the text.

In kanji: ateji suggestions

Ateji picks kanji for how they sound, not for what they mean — the same trick that writes America as 亜米利加. Every sound in Bradley has kanji that genuinely read that way, so these sets stay close to how the name is actually said.

舞羅土理

舞budance
羅rathin silk; long used to write foreign sounds
土doearth, soil
理rireason, principle

武良度里

武bumartial
良ragood — as in Nara
度dodegree, measure
里rivillage; a league

The held beat ッ gets no character — it is a pause, not a sound.

Read straight through, 4 characters is a mouthful even in Japanese. A shorter set built from the first two or three syllables is the usual compromise for a seal or a signature.

These are suggestions built from sound, not a translation of your name. We can tell you how each character reads and what it means on its own; we cannot tell you what the combination looks like to a Japanese reader, and we will not tell you it is safe to have tattooed. For anything permanent, show the exact design to someone who reads Japanese fluently first.

How common is Bradley in America?

1980peak year
91strank that year
764thrank in 2025
314,957born with it since 1880

18802025

It is quieter now than at its peak, without having disappeared.

Source: US Social Security Administration, national data 1880–2025. Names given to fewer than five babies in a year are not published, so rare spellings are missing rather than absent.

Bradley in Japanese name divination

ブ3 ラ2 ッ3 ド4 リ2 ー1 = 15 strokes

NumberStrokesReadingMeaning
地格 Earth15大大吉 Very auspiciousFortune and virtue
総格 Total15大大吉 Very auspiciousFortune and virtue

地格 Earth — The given name alone. Traditionally read as early life.

総格 Total — Every stroke in the name. Read as the whole life.

Only two of the five numbers can be calculated from a given name alone. Add a family name in the converter to see all five.

Seimei handan is a traditional Japanese practice, not a prediction. The stroke counts are arithmetic and verifiable; the readings attached to them are folklore, and schools disagree. We use the Kumazaki classification, which is the most widely published one.

This name comes to 15 strokes, which this school reads as 大大吉. That is the rarest band in the table — only 8 of 81 numbers carry it.

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