A wheel, because lists stop working
Most baby name sites hand you a list of four hundred names sorted alphabetically. Twenty names in, your eyes glaze and every name starts to look like every other name. A wheel does something a list can't: it shows you twelve at a time and then picks one for you, which is oddly clarifying — you find out how you feel about a name by watching it win.
How the names were chosen
The collection is deliberately small — 215 names — and deliberately wide. Rather than pad it with every spelling variant of the same twelve names, we included names across Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Norse, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Japanese, Chinese, Swahili, Igbo, Yoruba, Hawaiian, Spanish, Italian, French, Germanic, Greek and Latin traditions. Every entry carries an origin, a meaning and a set of style tags so the filters do something real.
Where meanings come from
Meanings are compiled from published etymological reference works. Where a name has more than one defensible reading — which is common, because names cross languages and pick up new stories on the way — we list the most widely accepted one and name the language it comes from rather than pretending the matter is settled. If you think an entry is wrong, we'd rather hear it than not.
How the spin works
Twelve names are drawn at random from whatever survives your filters, laid out around the wheel, and one is selected using your browser's random number generator. There's no weighting, no sponsorship and no hidden preference for particular names. Nothing you do on the site is recorded — see the privacy policy for the full picture.
How the site is funded
Pinwheel Names is free and carries advertising through Google AdSense. Ad slots sit below and between blocks of content, never beside the spin button, and every one is labelled. We don't accept payment to feature particular names.
Contact
Corrections, missing names, broken things, or anything else:
hello@pinwheelbabynames.online
We read everything and answer most things within a few days.