Baby Name Finder
How the data was made
Ten thousand names, typed in by hand, a region at a time. This page explains where they came from, what the site works out for itself, and where you should be sceptical.
Where the names come from
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.
What the site works out for itself
Two things about a name are derived 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.
Why the meanings are approximate
Meanings 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.
How the pages are built
Everything you see is generated from those text files by a build script: the finder itself, the 66 guide pages, their titles and descriptions, the schema, the internal links and the sitemap. Adding a name means editing one line and re-running the build. That is the same approach I use for client work — the spreadsheet tools and the sites I build for other people are generated from a single source of truth for the same reason.