First Name Generator

How the first name generator picks a name

The list holds 162 entries: 76 female and 86 male names, each tagged with one of seven origins and one of four styles. English is the longest origin list with 43 names. Spanish has 23, French 20, and German, Italian, Japanese and Arabic 19 each.

With every filter on “All”, each entry has the same 1 in 162 chance, so an English name comes up about 27% of the time. Each filter you set removes the names that do not match, and the draw is made from the rest. The pick uses the browser's cryptographic random generator, as described in how our randomness works.

Two names are listed twice: Emma as English and German, Antonio as Spanish and Italian. That makes 160 different names, and on “All origins” Emma and Antonio each come up 1 time in 81.

The gender, origin and style filters

• Gender: male, female or all.
• Origin: one of the seven language or cultural tags, or all origins for the full set.
• Style: modern (57 names), classic (36), traditional (60) or unique (9). The page assigns the tag to each name; it is not calculated.

Narrow filters shrink the pool fast. Female + Arabic + Classic leaves one name, Amira, so every click returns it. Male + Arabic + Unique leaves none.

The bold text is the name itself. The smaller line underneath shows the gender, origin and style tags the name carries in the list, so you can see why it matched your filters.

Limits of the first name list

If a filter combination has no matches, the tool says “No names match your criteria” and does not fall back to a different combination. The list is fixed: no names are added while you use it.

The names are a selection of well-known ones, not a ranking, and the page says nothing about how common a name is. For that, use official statistics. The Office for National Statistics found that the three most popular names for baby girls in England and Wales in 2023 were Olivia, Amelia and Isla, and for boys Muhammad, Noah and Oliver.

Example: a French sister and brother for a short story

A writer needs two French characters with current-sounding names. Set origin to French and style to Modern, then press the button with gender on Female and again on Male. The list has four modern French names for each gender (Chloé, Margot, Léa and Inès for girls), so a few clicks show the whole choice.

For their surname, the last name generator has a French list of 46. The middle name generator suggests five middle names by origin and style.

For a baby-name shortlist, the random boy name generator has 114 boy names in eight origin lists. Once you have two or three favorites, the picker wheel can choose between them.