About Anchit Labs

A one-person side project from Buxar, Bihar and wherever the laptop happens to be.

Hi, I'm Anchit Mittal. By day I work in financial planning and analysis; by night and on weekends I build small things for the web because I enjoy it. Anchit Labs is where those things live. Nothing here has a team, a funding round or a roadmap — each project exists because I wanted it to exist, and I keep it online as long as people find it useful.

What's here

There's also a long read on baby naming ceremonies around the world — namakarana, aqiqah, naam karan, brit milah, christening and more — for the "how and when" behind the names in the finder.

How the name data was made

The catalogue started as about twenty regional lists — Sanskrit, Arabic, English, Yoruba, Japanese and so on — each compiled by hand from public reference dictionaries of names, one language or region at a time, and it has grown since in the same way: a plain-text file per region, one name per line, with a gender marker, one or more origin labels, a short plain-English meaning, and a handful of style tags (classic, modern, trendy, nature-themed, devotional, short, gentle, legendary). Nothing is scraped or auto-translated; each entry was typed in by hand, which is also why the catalogue grows a few dozen names at a time rather than all at once.

Two things about a name are worked out from that raw data rather than typed in directly. The first is popularity tier: within each region's file, names are entered roughly most-common-to-rarest, so a name's position in the file — not any external popularity chart — sets whether it shows as a "popular" pick or a "rare gem" on the site. The second is tradition (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jewish or Buddhist): most of the time this is inferred from a name's origin (Sanskrit names default to Hindu, Hebrew to Jewish, and so on), but a name whose meaning mentions something unambiguous — Krishna, the Prophet, the Guru Granth Sahib, a saint's name — is reassigned by that instead, which is why a Sanskrit-origin name with an explicitly Islamic meaning still shows up correctly as Muslim rather than Hindu. Meaning themes (moon, light, victory, peace and twenty-odd others, used by the theme guide pages) work the same way: a name is tagged into a theme automatically when its meaning text matches a word list for that theme, not by hand.

Meanings themselves are given in plain English and are deliberately approximate. Most names, especially Sanskrit and Arabic ones, carry several layered or debated meanings depending on which root a scholar traces them to, and a one-line gloss can only give the most commonly cited sense — it is a starting point for a conversation with family or a priest, not the final word. I am not a linguist, and I have not independently verified every entry against a primary source; I have tried to use meanings that are widely and consistently cited, and to flag genuine uncertainty by simplicity rather than false precision. If you spot a name that looks wrong, missing, or spelled differently from how your family uses it, email me and I will look at it — corrections usually go live within a few days, since fixing the source file and re-running the build takes minutes.

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Contact

Email aanchit02@gmail.com, or find me on LinkedIn and Instagram.