← SkillSafe / Baby Name Generator

Names, with the difference between a settled meaning and a good story marked on them.

Say what you are after and get a shortlist: meaning, origin, how it is said, the short forms it picks up, and how the whole thing scans against your surname. Every meaning is labelled settled, disputed, folk or modern coinage — because you cannot check an etymology, and you will be repeating it for forty years.

All three come with a saved shortlist, so you can read a whole answer — the attestation labels, the monogram check, the disagreements the page found — without signing in or spending a credit.

The name you are looking for

Languages, cultures, a grandparent's country — whatever is drawing you.

How it should feel in the mouth, not how it should be spelt.

Comma separated. Spelling variants of these are out too.

What it has to live with

Used for the rhyme, seam and monogram checks — all done here, free.

Checked against both the spoken initials and the engraved monogram.

Comma separated. Their syllable counts and endings are measured here and handed over as facts, so “harmonises with” means something specific rather than whatever the model decides it means.

Fill in a line or two to price the run.

What this page computes and what it asks a model for

Computed here, in your browser, for nothing

  • Syllables, by an English spelling heuristic with a short list of documented exceptions. Every count the shortlist claims is checked against it.
  • Initials and the monogram, which are two different strings: initials run first-middle-last, an engraved monogram runs first-last-middle. A name can be clean spoken and awkward on a towel.
  • Surname clashes — full rhyme, half rhyme, alliteration, a seam where one name ends on the sound the next begins with, a vowel elision that slurs the join, and names that read equally well in either direction.
  • Nicknames, split into forms that fall out of the spelling by rule and the irregular conventional English ones that no rule produces.
  • Spelling risk — where English readers will say a name more than one way.

Asked of the model, and then checked

  • Meaning and origin, each with an attestation label. Settled, disputed between specialists, a folk etymology everyone repeats, a modern coinage with no ancient meaning, or genuinely unknown. Anything not settled must carry a note saying what the competing readings are.
  • Pronunciation as an English respelling. The page counts its beats and reports a mismatch against the syllable count.
  • Familiarity, as a band and never as a ranking. Popularity lists are re-cut every year; this app does not have this year's, so it does not quote one. A rank appearing anywhere in the answer is flagged automatically.
  • The downside of each name, which is the field that makes the rest of it worth reading.

Every disagreement between the two columns is shown next to the name it belongs to. A wrong syllable count is displayed, not quietly rendered.