Swipe & Match

How Swipe & Match works

Every card is a real published name from our collection of 17,111 names with a recorded meaning, drawn from 10 Turkic languages. Press the bookmark to keep a name, the cross to pass, or drag the card to the right or the left. The cards on screen follow your filters, and the order is a fixed shuffle, so you can stop and come back without seeing the same names in a different order.

Kept names collect on your shortlist, which lives in your browser. Nothing is sent to our server while you play on your own. Tap a card, or press the info button, to turn it over: the back shows the meaning, the origin, the languages the name is recorded for, its meaning themes and a label that tells you how well the meaning is sourced.

If you swipe the wrong way, the undo button takes the last choice back, and the card returns to the top of the pile. The counter above the cards shows how many names you have reviewed and kept, and your progress is saved on this device until you reset it.

Step by step

1. Open Filters if you want to narrow the deck by gender, language, meaning theme, origin or label. Without filters you see every name with a meaning.
2. Look at the name on the front of the card. Say it aloud, with your surname if you like, before you flip it.
3. Tap the card to read the meaning and the label, then keep it with the bookmark or pass with the cross. The arrow keys also work: right keeps, left passes, up or down turns the card, and Z undoes.
4. When you have a few favourites, open My shortlist to compare them, or start a Name Match to find out which ones someone else likes too.

Swiping with someone else

Press Invite someone and we create a private room with a long random link. You can begin with the names you have already saved. Send the link to your partner, a grandparent or a friend; each person opens it on their own phone, chooses an optional first name and swipes the same names alone.

A name only appears in the shared list when everybody in the room has kept it. What anyone passed on, or has not seen yet, is never shown to the others, so nobody has to defend a rejection. On the shared list you can write a short note and give each match a score from one to five, and the top picks are ranked by the average score.

A room holds up to six people. It needs no account and no e-mail address; your browser keeps a secret key that proves you are the same person next time. If you clear your browser data you lose that key and the room can no longer be opened as you. Rooms with no activity for 90 days are deleted automatically.

What the labels on the back of a card mean

Documented means a cited source states the meaning; 7,386 of the names with a meaning carry it. Likely means the meaning is composed from the parts of the name or supported by sources without being stated for the name itself. Editorial means the meaning comes from our own research and has not yet been linked to a cited source.

You can filter the deck by label, so you can swipe only Documented names if you prefer, or look at one of the 19 meaning themes, such as moon, light or strength.

Honest limits

• The cards are not ranked by popularity. We have no official birth statistics for these names, so the order is a seeded shuffle, not a list of favourites.
• A match means that everybody in the room liked the name, not that it is a good fit with your surname or your country's naming rules. The full name preview and the sibling name finder can help with that.
• The room link is a secret. Anyone who has it can join until the room is full, so share it only with the people you want to decide with.

Tips for choosing together

Swipe separately first and compare afterwards. When one person reads names aloud and the other reacts, the reader has already chosen which names to read. Looking only at the overlap removes that effect, and it spares both of you the awkward moment of rejecting a name out loud.

Questions and answers