Last revised: 30 May 2026 · Reviewed by the Baby Name Finder editorial team
1. Our mission
Baby Name Finder exists to help expecting parents, family members and the simply curious explore baby names from across the world with accuracy, respect for the cultures the names come from, and zero gatekeeping. Every name, every filter and every feature is free. The site is funded by display advertising; readers are never charged.
We measure our success by whether a reader leaves with a shorter, more confident shortlist than when they arrived — not by pageviews, time-on-site or any vanity metric.
2. Editorial principles
Accuracy first
Every meaning, etymology and popularity claim is checked against at least one authoritative source listed on our Data sources page.
Cultural respect
Names are presented in their native script and accents alongside the romanised form. We avoid anglicising names whose authoritative form lives in another script.
Transparency
We tell you where every claim comes from, what we don't know, and when a ranking is several months old.
Plain language
No SEO bloat, no padding. If a section adds nothing for a parent, it does not belong on the page.
Independence
Advertising never influences which names we include, how we rank them, or what we say about them.
Privacy by default
No accounts, no profiles, no name lookups tied to you. Shortlists stay in your browser.
3. Sourcing and inclusion
We add a name to the database only if at least one of the following is true:
- It appears in the most recent published national naming registry for one of the 15 supported languages — for example the U.S. Social Security Administration top 1,000, the UK ONS list, France's INSEE, or equivalents.
- It is documented in a recognised cultural or historical name dictionary for that language community.
- It is in active use in primary religious texts (Hebrew Bible, Quran, Vedas, etc.) for the cultures concerned.
Names that exist only on commercial baby-name forums, AI-generated lists, or fictional fan databases are not added. We will decline a reader's suggestion if we cannot trace it to one of the above.
The full per-language source list, with last-checked dates, is published on the Data sources page.
4. How a name is classified
Each entry carries four labels. Our reasoning for each:
Style: modern or traditional
A name is traditional if it has been recorded in the relevant national registry for fifty or more consecutive years, or has multi-generational documented use in the cultural community. A name is modern if it has risen sharply in the past ten to fifteen years, or first entered the relevant registry in that window. Some names qualify as both (for example Olivia: present for decades but currently at its modern peak); these are tagged accordingly.
Popularity tier: top 100, trending, under the radar
Tier is read directly from the most recent registry rank for the relevant language:
- Classic top 100 — ranked 1 to 100 in the most recent published year.
- Trending — ranked 101 to 300.
- Under the radar — ranked 301 or lower, or appears in a historical/cultural source but not in the most recent top 300.
If a language has no central naming registry, we fall back to the most recent academic survey or birth-records publication for the region. The exact source used is named on the Data sources page.
Length
Counted in characters of the romanised form (or native script if the name has no widely-used romanisation). 1–4 characters = short, 5–7 = medium, 8+ = long.
Gender
We use the gender weighting from the most recent national registry. Names that appear in both the boy and girl registries with more than 10% representation each are tagged as gender-neutral.
5. Fact-checking and review
Every name page goes through two passes before publication:
- Source pass. An editor cross-references every claim — meaning, origin language, rank, year — against at least one source on our Data sources page. The source URL is recorded in our internal sheet alongside the date checked.
- Native-script pass. For Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian names, a second editor with reading competence in the script verifies that the native-script form matches the romanisation and that no diacritic or character has been corrupted in transit.
Statistics published on the homepage — such as average name length by style, or cross-language name overlap — are computed directly from the published names.js dataset and are reproducible: anyone can verify them by downloading the file and running the same query.
6. Corrections policy
If you find an error — a wrong meaning, an incorrect ranking, a mistransliterated name — we want to know.
- Email us through the contact form with the page URL and what is wrong. Citations to the correct source help us move fast.
- We acknowledge within two business days.
- If the report is correct, the page is updated within five business days and we add a dated note at the foot of the page describing what changed.
- If the report is incorrect or contested (for example, two registries disagree), we publish a short note explaining the disagreement and which source we follow.
We do not silently rewrite history. Substantive corrections are timestamped.
7. Update cadence
- National rankings: refreshed within four weeks of the relevant registry's annual release.
- Name pages: reviewed at least once every twelve months.
- Trend articles and "names of 2026" pages: rewritten when the new year's data lands, typically Q2.
- Trust and legal pages: reviewed every six months and after any material change in operations.
Each page footer shows the most recent review date.
8. Advertising and editorial independence
This site is funded by display advertising, currently served via Google AdSense. We accept these constraints to keep the product free and uphold these rules:
- No advertiser has any input into which names are included, how they are ranked, or what the editorial team writes about them.
- We do not publish sponsored name pages, paid placements, or "featured by" entries on the generator.
- We do not accept payment in exchange for omitting a name, downgrading a competitor, or anything similar.
- Affiliate links, where used (currently none on name content), would be disclosed inline at the point of mention.
If we ever change any of these rules, the change will be announced on this page with a dated note.
9. Use of automation and AI
We are honest about how this site is built.
- The dataset of name strings is compiled by hand from the registries listed on the Data sources page. It is not scraped or LLM-generated.
- Category and letter index pages are produced by deterministic scripts (visible in the repository) from that dataset. The scripts only re-arrange the curated data; they do not invent.
- Name pages — meanings, origins, pronunciation, similar names — are drafted by an editor and reviewed against the source list. Where AI tools assist with first drafts of long-form prose, every claim is human-verified before publication. AI-only drafts are never published.
- Statistics on the homepage are computed directly from the dataset by code published in the repository, not generated.
10. Reader feedback
Email through the contact form. We read everything. We particularly welcome:
- Missing names you expected to find — especially in less-resourced languages.
- Native-speaker corrections to a meaning, transliteration or cultural framing.
- Pointers to a better national source than the one we currently cite.
- Suggestions for naming topics worth a long-form article.
We respond within two business days.