What this site is

IndianNameMeaning is a reference for Indian given names. It holds 10,227 name profiles; 6,388 of them carry a sourced meaning or enough evidence for a full entry and appear in search results. Each profile shows the meaning with its source, the spellings in use, the written forms in scripts such as Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Arabic, Odia, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil and Gujarati, and historical usage in India.

Where the information comes from

Dictionary meanings come mainly from Monier-Williams’s Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899) through the Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries, and from Wiktionary entries, each linked from the profile. Behind the Name supplies entry-level name histories, and Wikidata supplies given-name statements for the notable namesakes we mention. Usage in India comes from Naampy, a CC0 dataset derived from historical electoral rolls that mostly describes adults. Birth statistics abroad come from the Office for National Statistics for England and Wales and National Records of Scotland. The source register gives the licences and the exact releases.

How an entry is made

An editor compares a name’s spelling with the cited source, writes a short account of its meaning and records the evidence behind it. Where a name has several readings, each keeps its language and citation. Where we cannot support a derivation, the profile says so and gives no meaning. Our methodology and editorial policy set out the rules in full.

What the figures mean

Usage figures describe records, not people. Naampy counts below 100 are never shown, and a missing figure is not zero. Origin names the language of a word and says nothing about the background of anyone who bears it. See usage in India for the limits of the data.

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Contact

Write to contact@indiannamemeaning.com. See Contact for what to include.