About BoyNames.net

Every popularity claim on this site comes from the U.S. Social Security Administration's national baby-name data, 2025 data year. That is the only popularity source used anywhere here. No other country's registry, no search-volume estimate, no site's internal traffic dressed up as a trend.

What that buys you is a specific kind of reliability. A numeric rank appears only for a name inside the SSA 2025 top 100, and it is the rank in that table. For every other name — which is to say 1,302 of the 1,402 — the site says the name is outside the current U.S. top 100 and adds a qualitative note it can defend: rare in the United States, an everyday name in Poland, a 1950s staple that has faded. You will not find "around #250" or "roughly top 300" on any page, because those numbers would be guesses.

Two consequences are worth saying out loud. First, the ranks are American. A name can be entirely ordinary in Norway, Nigeria or Vietnam and simply not appear in this dataset, and that absence is not evidence of rarity — the pages are written to avoid implying otherwise. Second, the whole site is checked against that single table mechanically before publication, so a rank that contradicts it is a build failure rather than a matter of taste.

Conservatively, and with the disagreements left visible. Where the scholarship is settled, the page states the meaning and its components. Where it is not, the page says "traditionally glossed as" or "one derivation is" and names the competing accounts. Eino's popular "the only one" reading is flagged as a later folk etymology; Stellan's origin is described as unresolved, because it is.

Three rules follow from that stance. A name appears on a meaning page only if it carries that meaning in its own source language, not if it resembles the English word — which is why Paxton, an Old English farmstead name, is absent from the peace list. Where meaning depends on writing rather than sound, as in Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese names, the page says the meaning is character-dependent and gives the common writings as examples rather than as a definition. And where a name is a full clause, as in Yoruba and Igbo, the clause is given whole: Adebayo is "the crown meets joy", not "joy".

Every bearer mentioned on this site is a real, verifiable person, living or historical. There is no filler, no invented "actor" or "footballer" conjured to fill a section. When two genuine bearers cannot be named for a particular name, the page writes about the name's cultural presence instead — the saga it comes from, the king who carried it, the register it belongs to — and says nothing at all rather than something plausible.

Most name sites pad. If a list promises twenty names, twenty names appear, and the last eight are stretched. This site would rather be short and correct, and it says so on the page when it is.

Names that mean dragon is three names long. It stays three because Europe spent a thousand years casting the dragon as the thing a hero kills rather than the thing a hero is, so the longer lists elsewhere are counting dragon-slayers. Boy names starting with Q covers nine names, because the English Q stock arrived through one narrow Norman channel and there is no honest way to lengthen it. Where a promise cannot be kept, the promise changes rather than the standard: names that mean miracle became a page about the names families give when a birth defied expectation, since the word itself has produced almost no boys' names.

There is no review board here, no linguistics department, no panel of credentialled experts. What there is, is a stated policy and a validator that enforces the mechanical parts of it. Judge the pages on whether they hold to what is written above.

You will also not find numerology, name energy, personality-by-initial, or any claim that a name will shape a child's character. Those belong to a different kind of site.

If something here is wrong — an etymology, a pronunciation, a bearer, a rank — corrections are welcome at [email protected]. Specific corrections with a source are the most useful thing anyone can send.