BoyNames.net

Boy names by origin

Forty-four traditions, each with its own page. They differ far more than vocabulary: a Yoruba name is a complete sentence, a Japanese name is a sound waiting for characters, a Slavic name is two words welded together, and Basque is related to none of them.

Britain, Ireland and Western Europe

Three Celtic languages, three Germanic ones, one Romance, and a language isolate older than all of them.

Southern Europe and the classical world

Latin and Greek are the two root stocks that feed half the rest of this site; Italian, Spanish and Portuguese are Latin still living, each with its own saints' calendar on top.

The Nordic world

Five Germanic pages and one that is not Germanic at all. Norse is the saga layer; the country pages are what Nordic children are actually called now.

Central and Eastern Europe

Four Slavic traditions running on the same two-element compounding system, plus Hungarian, which is Uralic and belongs to an entirely different story.

The Middle East and the Caucasus

Two Semitic traditions, one Iranian, one Turkic, and one that has a branch of Indo-European entirely to itself.

Africa

Yoruba and Igbo names are sentences; Swahili and Akan run systematic day-name cycles; Ethiopian is mostly Amharic over a Geʽez and Tigrinya layer; and Egyptian is two pages in one, the pharaonic layer and the Coptic and Arabic names of Egypt today.

Asia

Four of these six write their meanings with Chinese characters, which is why their pages spend so much time on writing rather than sound. Indian names run on Sanskrit roots and deity epithets; Filipino names come in two layers, native Tagalog and Spanish colonial.

The Pacific and the Americas

Mexican and Brazilian are national-usage pages, not language pages: each carries a Spanish or Portuguese layer over a living indigenous one, Nahuatl in Mexico and Tupi in Brazil. Hawaiian names are transparent compounds, readable once you know the article.

Traditions differ in kind, not just in vocabulary

Most name sites treat origin as a label — a flag next to a word. It is closer to a grammar. These are the differences that change how a meaning should even be written down.

  • A Yoruba name is a clause with a subject. Adebayo is adé (crown) + bá (meets) + ayọ̀ (joy) — "the crown meets joy", and the crown is the thing doing the meeting. Glossing it as "joy" throws the grammar away. Igbo works the same way around chi, a person's own destiny-spirit: Chukwuemeka is "God has done a great thing", Chidi is "God exists".
  • A Japanese, Korean or Chinese name is a sound waiting for characters. Ryu is usually 竜 or 龍, dragon — but 隆 is eminence and 流 is a current, and the family chooses at the register office. The clean counter-example is Korean Haneul, 하늘: ordinary Korean vocabulary with no hanja behind it, so its meaning, sky, cannot be reinterpreted at all.
  • A Slavic name is two elements welded together. -sław is glory, -mir is peace and world at once, woj- is warrior. Vladimir is volod- "to rule" plus -měrŭ "great, famous", with that second element later reread as mir. Once the seams are visible, a wall of consonants becomes a sentence.
  • Basque is a language isolate. After two centuries of trying, no one has tied Euskara to any other language on earth. Its names are plain Basque words: Aritz is the pedunculate oak specifically, since Basque keeps separate words for the Pyrenean and holm oaks, and Unai is the cowherd.
  • Day-names are a system, not a coincidence. Akan gives a full week of them — Kwame is born on a Saturday, Kwabena on a Tuesday — and Swahili has its own set. Six of the eighty-six K names on this site are Akan day-names.
  • Ancient Egyptian names have no certain pronunciation. Egyptian script recorded consonants only, so Ramses, Khufu and Thutmose are modern scholarly conventions rather than recovered sounds. The Egyptian page says so, and separates them from names given in Egypt today.

How big each tradition is here

The pages are not the same size, and they should not be. Counting every name on the site tagged to a tradition, Latin leads with 227, then Greek at 193, English at 184 and Hebrew at 154 — inflated because those four feed each other constantly, and a single name can be Greek by root, Latin by transmission and English by use. At the other end, Yoruba and Igbo have 24 names apiece, and that is a real floor rather than a shortfall: every one of the 44 traditions has at least 24 name pages behind it.

Each origin page then lists between 24 and 36 of those names in full. The order is the same everywhere: names that genuinely chart in the United States first, with their real SSA 2025 ranks and no invented ones, then the traditional core, then a third section shaped by the culture — anglicised forms for Irish, the Shahnameh layer for Persian, the Kalevala layer for Finnish, the pre-colonial titles for Filipino. Every page closes with two paragraphs on how that tradition actually builds a name, and every entry carries a pronunciation respelling for English speakers.

Origin pages are where wishful etymology does the most damage, because a foreign word is harder for a reader to check. Where scholars disagree these pages say so: Eino's familiar "the only one" gloss is folk etymology, and Stellan's origin is genuinely unresolved.

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