About NamePetal

NamePetal is a library of baby names from every culture on earth — built on one stubborn rule: a name's meaning is a fact, and facts get checked.

How we work

Every profile in this library was assembled from published sources: the etymologies and name references gathered by Wikipedia and Wiktionary (both freely licensed), and popularity figures from the US Social Security Administration's public baby-names data, which records every name given to at least five American babies in a year since 1880. Each profile links to the source its meaning was checked against.

Where sources disagree about a name — or where a name's origin is genuinely debated among scholars — the profile says so in plain words. Where a meaning simply isn't recorded in the standard references, the profile says that too. We would rather show an honest gap than a confident invention, especially for names from religious traditions, which receive an extra verification pass before they are published.

What you'll find

Names are shelved by the tradition they come from — English & American, Biblical & Christian, Muslim & Arabic, Hindu & Indian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Irish & Celtic, Greek and Scandinavian — and every name can also be found by letter, by gender, or by searching (our search understands nicknames: try “Liz” or “Bobby”).

The family

NamePetal is one of nine free sites run by the same small team: CalcVitals (health calculators), CalcPrincipal (finance calculators), CalcCoverage (DIY calculators), CalcWhen (everyday tools), CalcPairs (unit converters), AllPetBreeds (pet breed profiles), PDFDrawer (PDF tools) and Cálculos Fáciles (calculators in Spanish). All of them are free, and none of them ask you to sign up.

Contact

Corrections, missing names, kind words: [email protected].