screenshot

About the Unique Baby Name Generator

The Name Generator uses statistics about current baby naming trends to generate new names that are both easy to read and pronounce.

First probability character sequences (n-grams) are computed from the Social Security Administration (SSA) list of popular baby names. The probability of each sequence corresponds to the probability a baby born will have that sequence of characters in his or her name. A language model with Kneser-Ney smoothing then uses those probabilities sequence to generate a new sequence of highly probable letter groupings. This approach allows the name generate new names that confirm to the English language.

While language models typically generate new strings, there is nothing mathematically preventing them from generating existing words or names. If a generated name is a frequently used baby name (e.g. Noah or Emma), it is automatically discarded. Infrequent names (those occurring less than 200 times, or given to less than 0.01% of all babies born in a given year) are kept, unless requested otherwise in the advance options panel. Changing the year in the advanced options panel will change SSA list the language model is trained on. The names generated will then sound more similar to names from that time period.


Love Unique Baby Names? Try our other Baby Name Apps, like the Baby Name Blender which merges two names into one or or Alternate Spelling Suggester. The Baby Name Uniqueness Analyzer can let you know just how unusual that name is, and what the chances are an individual with that name is to encounter another person with the same name. The Baby Name Explorer lets you explore names based on gender ratio, substring, popularity, or the number of syllables. Finally, the Nickname Finder can help you find that perfect nick name.