The following websites offer lists of given names together with
informations about these names. (According to this definition
AboutNames.ch is also such a website.)
The sites are summarized in a table, with further informations and
comments about each of them after the table.
In the table the "Info" link goes to these further informations
while the "Site" link goes directly to the external site itself.
For some of the sites the number of names that they contain is only
a rough estimate. The columns of the table indicate whether a certain
type of information is present on the site or not.
http://www.behindthename.com/
This is a site with informations of a very good quality and covers
names from many languages and countries. The author works on the site
since 1996, and it shows. A very lively message board is included as
well.
http://www.americanbaby.com/ab/babynames/
For some names this site gives famous people with the name and
purported "personality traits" of people with the name. The search
functions allows to search according to language of origin.
http://www.babychatter.com/ This is a site with a decent list of names that one can browse
alphabetically as well as grouped according to language,
and a lot of other things for future parents and babies.
http://www.babynamecenter.com/
The "Baby Name Center" offers a very large collection of Biblical
names, albeit without meanings, as well as Shakespearean and Native
American names.
http://www.babynameguide.com/
Quite a lot of name are grouped into several categories as well as
searchable by some kind of full text search.
http://www.babynamelocator.com/
This site has 2 things that differentiate it from many other sites:
A random search gives you 15 random names at at time and hopefully
some naming ideas, and for many names there are lists of variants
(not unlike the grouping of names on this site here).
http://www.baby-names-plus.com/
Nice on this site are the possibility to interactively build your own
list of favorite names and a link section to other name- and
baby-related sites.
http://www.parenthood.com/babynames.html
On the massive Parenthood.com
website there is also a rather good section about names, with a large
database, the possibility to build a list of favorite names and some
nice articles about naming babies.
http://www.ebusinessrevolution.com/babynames/
Here everybody can contribute names, and the whole list of names from
all over the world is freely availably under the GNU public license.
However, it might be that this project is not actively managed
anymore - the last update date given is back in 2002.
http://baby-names-etc.com/
Special on this otherwise rather conventional site is the list of
famous people and their birthdays (see "Birth Day Fun"), so you can
consider to let these influence your name-finding.
http://babynames.keepkidshealthy.com/
This is quite a versatile baby naming site with the possibility to
build an own list of favorites, to see a number of randomly chosen
names and even let a script generate new names. Some articles with
naming tipps are included as well.
http://www.mybirthcare.com/favorites/babynames.asp
On the quite comprehensive "Birthcare" site there is also a section
about names. The name database seems large, but whether it really
contains the purported huge number of 40'000 entries is hard to tell.
The search function is nice because it allows to search names which
contain a certain letter sequence.
http://www.babynamenetwork.com/
This site gives a lot of informations per name: not only meaning and
language, but also the rank in the last decade according to US
statistics, alternatives (variants in other languages, short forms),
nicknames, and even namesakes. For important names like "John" this
gives an impressive page full of informations.
http://www.babynameworld.com/
Nice on this site is the grouping of names according to language of
origin and use. However, as a native speaker of German I was able to
spot some dubious names on the page with German names...
http://www.babycenter.com/baby-names
The search function on this site allows to specify the number of
syllables of the name, something rarely possible. There are also quite
a number of pages with statistical informations about names in the
US.
http://www.babynamer.com/
This is a very good site with a surprising number of features: a lot
of names, with comprehensive informations about origin and language as
well as statistical informations; lists of "other forms" for many
names (forms in other languages, nicknames, short and pet forms - what
I call "grouping" on my own site); the possibility to list "similar"
names (according to the 5 criterias starting letter, number of
syllables, popularity trend, language of origin and related meaning);
namesakes; etc.
http://www.baby-names-world.com/
This is a nice site with a flexible "Advanced search" function, lively
forums and an interesting statistics section.
http://www.cool-baby-names.com/
The name database of "Cool Baby Names" seems large, but whether it
really contains the purported huge number of over 50'000 entries is
hard to tell. Certainly nice are the category searches with categories
like "Flowers & Plants", "Animals & Birds", "Biblical Names",
"Famous Actors" etc.
http://www.babynames.com.au/
is an alternative URL for this site.
http://www.diaperdandies.com/
This is a somewhat simple site, but the names are there. Special is
the list of birthdays of famous people sorted by date.
http://www.thenamesite.com/
This site offers some special numerological and astrological
informations about names like Lucky Number, Ruling Planet and Element.
http://www.20000-names.com/
The domain name already makes it clear: There are a lot of names at
this site, and the names are in a surprising number of about 50
groups according to language of use/country.
http://www.names2be.com/
This site seems to have started with the widely-used 16'000 name
database of Baby Naming, but
was expanded afterwards and now reaches 22'000 names.
http://www.allgirlbabynames.com/
http://www.allboybabynames.com/
If you already know what baby will be this pair of sites with
name meanings and origins makes the search simple - just choose the
appropriate one, and no names of the other gender will get in the
way!
http://www.yeahbaby.com/
This site offers a quite large database with one of the most flexible
search functions around, celebrity names, a lot of articles with baby
naming tips, message boards, and various name hitparades.
http://www.thinkbabynames.com/
This is a site with a quite large database, name variants
conveniently listed together with "main" names, and extensive
name hitparades and statistical information.
http://www.babynameaddicts.com/
This is a site with a massive database of 51'000 names that has a
clear focus to provide reliable etymological information. There are
special things like popularity graphs for names and names invented by
members of the "community" of BNA as well.
http://www.all-babynames.com/
This site has 17'000 given names from all over the world that you
can search e.g. by country or by continent.
http://www.babynamesgarden.com/
Special on this site are the extensive popularity lists, the versatile
"Advanced Search" function and the Baby Names Blog.
http://www.babynamescountry.com/
This is a nice site with a large database of 20'000 names from all
over the world, thankfully lacking the advertising overdose of some
other baby name websites.
http://www.quickbabynames.com/ This site offers 20'0000 meanings of names and baby names
statistics, searchable by origins, "style", "impression", and
popularity. The search for "impression" (explained
here)
is an interesting approach.