Boy names by meaning

The 55 pages are not the same length, and the differences are the most interesting thing on this index. Peace and Victory are the fullest, at 25 names each. Victory also has the widest reach of any page on the site: its 25 names come from 21 separate traditions, because at least seven unrelated roots produce the idea independently — Latin vincere, Greek nikē, Old Norse sigr, Sanskrit jaya, Tamil veṟṟi, Somali guul and Finnish voitto.

Breadth and depth are not the same thing. Strong holds 24 names but draws them from only 12 traditions, and five of the 24 are Hebrew. Peace is a similar shape for a different reason: it arrives by three roads, the Germanic frid names in which peace is a ruler's duty, the Semitic root s-l-m that puts Hebrew shalom and Arabic salām on the same three consonants, and the plain vocabulary words of Turkish, Japanese and Hawaiian.

Then there is the thin end. Dragon is three names long — Japanese, Korean and Nahuatl — and 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. Every long dragon list you will find elsewhere is quietly counting dragon-slayers. Gold runs to five, since almost everything offered under that heading means wealth, or treasure, or a treasurer, but not the metal. Moon is six, from three traditions, because across the world's naming stock the moon is overwhelmingly a girls' idea. Hunter is eight from three traditions, and heavily English, because England turned trades into surnames and surnames into first names while most languages never handed out a personal name meaning hunter at all.

The admission rule is single and strict: the name must carry the meaning in its source language, not resemble it in English. That rule removes a lot of familiar entries. Paxton is not a peace name — it is Old English, "Pæcc's farmstead", and the resemblance to Latin pax is an accident. The whole Stephen family is not a victory name: stephanos is the woven wreath given to the winner, which is a different claim about a different object.

Sometimes the rule reshapes a page rather than shortening it. Miracle could not be a list of names meaning miracle, because that word has produced almost no boys' names in any language covered here. What it became instead is a list of the names families give when a birth defied expectation, each glossed with what it literally says. That is a smaller promise and a truer one.

Every meaning page carries the same furniture: a flat list of names with pronunciation and a real etymology for each, prose grouping them into two or three flavours, a filter box, and links out to neighbouring meanings. Where a page is short, its opening line explains why, and where a name is a near miss it is named at the bottom rather than quietly folded in.