Where Your Name Translations Come From
About 200,000 of the name translations on this site are built from a pronunciation, and each one is run through the calligraphy generation engine before it reaches you: if it produces an error or invalid output, it never reaches the catalog. A further 90,000 names come from the JMnedict Japanese-name dictionary. Together the catalog holds over 290,000 name translations.
This article explains where those names come from, how each one is checked, and how the inventory continues to grow.
What You Are Buying
When you purchase a Japanese calligraphy design of your name, you are buying a specific pairing: your name and a particular way of writing it in Japanese romanization (romaji). "Michael" paired with maikeru is one product. "Michael" paired with mihyaeru, the German reading, is a different product. Both are valid — they represent different Japanese renderings of the same English name.
The romaji determines which Japanese characters appear in the calligraphy. Different romaji produce different art. This is why one name can have multiple designs — and why getting the romaji right matters.
Each design also carries a pronunciation guide that helps you recognize the Japanese rendering as your own name. Maikeru with the pronunciation "MY-keh-roo" tells you: this is how a Japanese speaker would say Michael using these characters.
For an overview of how these characters work, see How to Write Names in Japanese.
Six Sources
No single data source contains everything needed. Six primary sources each contribute something unique:
ParaNames (309,000 names) — The backbone. Extracted from Wikidata, the structured knowledge base behind Wikipedia.
Tsumugi (Satoshi Sato Laboratory, Nagoya University) — A database of the katakana spellings Japanese writers actually use for foreign names, with a usage count for each spelling. For Michael it records マイケル (maikeru), ミシェル (misheru) and ミヒャエル (mihyaeru), among others. Those counts help decide which reading a name page shows first in your language.
BehindTheName (65,000+ names) — A curated name reference providing etymological meanings and native-language pronunciations. BehindTheName is the bridge between name data and the etymology system that powers kanji designs.
National name records (14 countries) — Government name-frequency files. They set which names we researched first.
WorldSys and Alphapolis (52,000 names combined) — Two supplementary sources from Japanese publishing, adding names primarily from Asian and non-Western language contexts.
The full list of reference works is available on our Name Resources page.
How Sources Combine
Sources are merged before deduplication. This sounds like a technical detail, but it directly affects what you see.
Consider the name Andrea. In Italian, Andrea is a male name. In English, Andrea is a female name. If the system kept only one Andrea record, it would lose one cultural context. By merging first, both language variants survive — the Italian Andrea and the English Andrea are separate products with separate pronunciations, because they represent genuinely different cultural traditions.
The deduplication key is the triple: name, romaji, and language. The same name with different romanizations or from different languages produces separate records. This preserves the reality that names mean different things in different places.
Filtering
Not everything in the raw data is a name. Particles like "de," "van," and "al" are name components, not standalone names. Titles like "Sir" and "Dr" are honorifics. These are filtered before entering the catalog.
Corrections
When a data quality issue is found — an incorrect romanization, a wrong language tag — it is corrected through a permanent override. Once written, a correction is never silently reverted. The system does not change beneath you.
The Quality Gate
Every pronunciation is run through the engine
Every pronunciation in the system has been sent through the calligraphy generation engine and the result checked. The engine has strict rules about which sounds it can process, and a pronunciation containing a sound combination it does not recognize produces an error and never reaches the catalog.
Running every pronunciation in advance means you never meet a "this name cannot be generated" failure. What the check proves is that a design can be made. Which reading is right for you rests on the pronunciation it is built from, shown beside it on the name page, so you can choose the one that matches how you say your name.
The ratchet
The inventory only grows. Names are added but never silently removed. If a name needs correction, a new record replaces it — the pronunciation is updated, not deleted. Today's 290,000 name translations are a floor, not a ceiling.
290,000 Name Translations and Growing
| Metric | Count |
|---|---|
| Searchable name translations | over 290,000 |
| — built from a pronunciation, engine-checked | ~200,000 |
| — from the JMnedict dictionary | ~90,000 |
| Unique names | ~189,000 |
Full records — etymology, kanji matches, famous people — are computed as a batch task and continue to fill in across the catalog. This is processing work, not a quality gap.
How the inventory expands
Three paths add new names:
Source expansion — New data sources or expanded collection from existing ones. The BehindTheName collection is currently in progress, with over 100,000 names in the queue. Each batch adds names not found in other sources.
Language expansion — Processing names from additional languages through the pronunciation system. A recent expansion added 55,000 names in a single session — names already in the system with romanizations but waiting for pronunciation support. German, Russian, Dutch, and Swedish names were already there; they just needed pronunciation labels.
Dictionary expansion — Adding pronunciation dictionaries for new languages. The system currently uses five language cascades. Extending to more languages would unlock names that currently have no pronunciation match. For more on this, see How We Pronounce Your Name.
Priority
Not all names are processed in random order. Name frequency drives priority: the most common names are processed first. The long tail is processed progressively.
This means that if your name is common, it is almost certainly in the system. If your name is rare, it may be among the names being added — or you can request it directly.
Search for your name in Japanese — over 290,000 name translations, with designs composed from characters Master Takase brushed by hand.