About NameMatch

NameMatch started with a complaint we kept hearing from expecting parents: choosing a baby name with your partner is harder than it should be. Couples reach the third trimester with a six-month backlog of vetoed names, an exhausted appetite for conversation, and a feeling that they will end up settling. The problem wasn't the shortage of names. It was the absence of a process.

So we built one. NameMatch is a couples baby-naming app where each partner swipes independently through a deck of names, and the app surfaces only the names you both liked. The disagreements never have to be voiced. The agreements rise to the top on their own. What was a six-month negotiation becomes a fifteen-minute conversation about names you already share.

The result is the part we're most proud of: couples discover surprising common ground. Two people who think they have completely different taste often share three or four names neither of them would have proposed first. Those are the names that win.

1. Pick your vibe.Choose boy names, girl names, or both — then start swiping in seconds. No signup required.
2. Swipe through names.Each card shows the name's origin, meaning, popularity, and how it flows with your surname. Swipe to like, pass, or love each name.
3. The engine learns your taste.By your fifteenth swipe, NameMatch has built a taste profile from 69 dimensions of preference — sound patterns, syllable counts, cultural origins, and name styles. Your deck gets smarter with every swipe.
4. Invite your partner. Share a session code or link. Your partner swipes on their own device, at their own pace, without seeing what you swiped on.
5. Discover your matches.When you both like the same name, NameMatch celebrates it in real time. If you both loved a name, it's a shared favorite.
6. Build your shortlist. Matched names go to your shared shortlist. Add notes, check surname flow, and rank your favorites together.
7. Agree on a name.Use collaborative ranking with Borda count — a fair voting method that resists tactical voting — to go from your shortlist to your final name.

NameMatch has one of the largest curated baby name databases available, spanning Italian, Greek, English, Hebrew, French, Irish, Norse, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, Latin, and Indian roots. Every name includes its meaning, etymology, popularity trend, style classification, and (for editorially indexed names) a long-form story explaining where the name comes from and how it has traveled.

We started with the United States Social Security Administration's public name records going back to 1880, then layered in historical and cultural sources: classical Greek and Hebrew dictionaries, Old Norse and Old Irish onomastics, modern Japanese kanji-name databases, and Arabic and Indian name traditions. Every entry was normalized against the same six-dimensional ontology: meaning, origin, phonetics, popularity, style cluster, and cultural register.

Most baby name apps show you random names or simple alphabetical lists. NameMatch is different. It watches how you swipe and builds a detailed taste profile in the background. The engine tracks sixty-nine dimensions of preference including phonetic patterns, vowel-to-consonant ratios, syllable counts, cultural origins, and thematic clusters — nature names, virtue names, biblical names, mythological names, literary names, royal and classic names, and more.

The model is a hybrid: a lightweight collaborative filter that learns which names tend to be liked together, plus a content-aware reranker that incorporates the structural features of each name. By swipe fifteen, the deck is personalized to your taste. Crucially, your partner's profile is built independently — the system doesn't blend you into a single user. Each of you gets your own deck, and the overlap is computed only where it matters: at the moment of match.

Surname compatibility is the most-skipped step in the naming process. We made it the first one. When you enter your surname, NameMatch computes a flow score for every name you see: how the syllables collide, whether there is alliteration or rhyme, the consonant clusters between the two words, and the overall phonetic balance.

Your surname is stored in your browser and sent with discovery requests so the ranking service can calculate flow for that round. It is used for request-scoped scoring and is not saved to your account or copied into analytics event properties.

Personalization starts in local browser storage. When you sign in, swipes and learned taste can sync across devices; surname and avoid-list choices are not synced to your account and are sent only with discovery requests. We do not sell your data. Authentication uses Supabase's cookie-based session model, scoped to the name-match.com origin only. Product analytics masks form inputs and page text in session recordings and sanitizes private routes and invite codes. Our privacy policy lists the analytics and the Google ad tags the site uses.

When you sign in with email, Apple, or Google, only the identity needed to sync your progress across devices is stored. You can delete your account from settings at any time; deletion removes the account data stored in the NameMatch application database.

We don't auto-generate name copy from a template and call it content. Every long-form “name story” on the site is drafted from primary historical and linguistic sources, then reviewed for accuracy by a human editor before publication. We only ask search engines to index names that have a vetted story and that people are actually looking for. Every other name is still searchable here, but its page is marked noindex so the broader web's view of NameMatch reflects our strongest work, not what an algorithm could have generated.

Our blog publishes essays on naming, not listicles. We try to write things that would earn their own keep without traffic optimization — deep dives on a single origin, arguments about taste, primary-source explorations of how names have moved across centuries. If something reads like it was made for search engines, it isn't ours.

NameMatch is a web app that works in any browser on your phone, tablet, or computer. Just visit name-match.com and start swiping. No app store, no installation, no friction. The browser tab is the app.

NameMatch is built by a small team of designers and engineers based in San Francisco and London. Some of us are parents. Some of us are about to be. All of us have, at some point, sat across from a partner with a list of names that neither side could love. We're building the tool we wish we'd had.

If you have feedback, a name we missed, an etymology you think we got wrong, or just a story about how you found your name, we want to hear it. Email support@name-match.com.