Everything you might want to know about NameRoot — how it works, what makes it different, and answers to the questions parents ask us most.
Quick answers for first-time users.
NameRoot is a baby naming app for parents who care about more than just whether a name sounds nice. We score every name across six signals — sound, numerology, cultural & tradition fit, semantic meaning, uniqueness, and (for Hindu families with a birth time) nakshatra alignment — and we generate AI portraits showing what a baby with that name might look like.
It's built for the modern global parent: 13 religions, 23 ethnicities, names from across the world, and a scoring engine that personalises every suggestion to your family.
Yes — you can use NameRoot free forever. The free version includes name browsing, basic meanings, family preferences, the swipe interface, and a daily allowance of personalised suggestions.
Premium unlocks unlimited name generations, full score breakdowns, premium facts about each name, AI baby portraits, and ad-free use. See the Premium & Billing section for details.
No. NameRoot works immediately when you open it — no sign-up required. Your favorites and preferences are stored locally on your device.
Signing in with Google is optional but recommended. It lets you sync favorites across devices, restore your premium subscription if you reinstall, and ensures your data isn't lost if you switch phones.
Yes. The birth date is only used if you want nakshatra-based scoring (relevant for Hindu families following Vedic astrology). If you don't enter it, NameRoot simply skips that signal and uses the other six.
At launch, NameRoot includes more than 8,000 names. We deliberately chose depth over breadth — each name has been hand-curated with six signals of cultural metadata, native script, pronunciation, meaning, fascinating facts, and an AI portrait. Most competitor apps have 30,000+ names but treat them as flat database entries with just gender and a one-line meaning.
We add new names every month based on user requests and community contributions.
NameRoot is available on iPhone (Apple App Store) and Android (Google Play). You can use Sign in with Apple or a Google account on multiple devices to sync your favorites and restore your premium purchase.
The science behind the scores.
Every name in NameRoot gets a personalised score from 1 to 100 based on how well it fits your specific family. The score is computed from six signals:
A score of 92 doesn't mean "this is the right name" — it means "this name aligns strongly with what you've told us matters to you." A 64 isn't a wrong name. The scores are a compass, not a verdict. The best name is the one that makes both parents smile when they imagine calling it across a park on a Sunday afternoon.
So we can score names against your specific family rather than guessing. The phonetic engine checks how a name sounds beside your own — vowel patterns, syllable rhythm, ending sounds. The numerology and meaning signals also use your names as a baseline.
Your names are stored only on your device by default. They're never used for advertising, marketing, or shared with anyone.
By default, NameRoot does show you popular names. If you've turned on the "Skip very common names" filter in Settings, we hide the top 10% most popular names globally — names like Aarav, Olivia, Muhammad, Liam, and similar. The remaining 90% includes both well-known and distinctive names.
You can toggle this filter on or off anytime. If you turn it off, your favorites already saved will remain.
We deliberately mix names across three popularity tiers — globally familiar, regionally distinctive, and rare gems — so your discovery feels balanced. Then we filter by your selected religion, ethnicity, and gender preferences, score each name with the six signals, and shuffle the results so you don't always see the highest-scored names first.
This is intentional. If we sorted strictly by score, you'd see the same 50 names every session and miss beautiful options that score 75 instead of 92. Discovery matters more than ranking when picking a name.
Yes — premium users can tap any score to see a breakdown showing which signals contributed positively, which were neutral, and the human-readable explanation for each. We deliberately don't show the raw weights or technical details — those would just be noise. What matters is the story.
We work hard to get meanings right. Each name's primary meaning is sourced from authoritative references, cross-checked against multiple sources, and reviewed for cultural accuracy. We also include alternate meanings where they exist (some names have different meanings in different traditions).
That said, language evolves and meanings can vary by region or scholarly interpretation. If you spot an error, please report it from the name detail screen — we update the corpus weekly based on user reports.
Yes — NameRoot has a couple mode. Pair with your partner using a one-time partner invite code (or the link you share), and you'll get a shared shortlist that syncs to both phones in real time, a "you both love it" celebration when you both save the same name, and a shared chosen name.
Pair anytime from Settings. You can unpair whenever you like — each partner keeps their own individual saved names.
About our generated baby imagery.
No. Every portrait in NameRoot is generated by AI specifically for your name selection and cultural background. They are imagined, not photographed. No real baby's photo is ever shown in the app.
We use Google's Imagen and similar AI models trained to produce photorealistic but synthetic imagery. The portraits are illustrative — they show what a baby might look like for that name in that cultural context, not what your actual baby will look like.
Each portrait is generated based on the name's cultural background — the religion, ethnicity, and gender associated with that name. So the portrait for Aarav (Indian boy) will look different from the portrait for Yusuf (Arabic boy) or Sakura (Japanese girl).
We do not use any personal information about you to generate the portrait. It's purely about representing the name's cultural origin.
Two reasons. First, AI imagery has natural variation — every name gets a unique portrait, and they don't always match cultural expectations perfectly. Second, we deliberately show diversity within cultural groups rather than reinforcing stereotypes.
If you see a portrait that feels mismatched or inappropriate, please report it from the name detail screen and we'll regenerate it.
The first time you see a name, NameRoot needs to download its portrait from our servers. This takes a few seconds depending on your connection. Once loaded, the portrait is cached on your device and loads instantly next time.
We also pre-load portraits for the next several names in your deck while you're swiping, so you should rarely see a loading state after the first few cards.
No. NameRoot does not generate portraits from real photos, faces, or personal data. We do not accept photo uploads of children for processing. The portraits are imagined representations based only on the name's cultural background.
This is intentional for child safety — we will never build features that involve generating or processing imagery of real children.
What we collect, how we use it, and your rights.
By default, almost nothing leaves your device. Your favorites, preferences, parent names, and birth date are stored locally on your phone.
If you Sign in with Apple or Google, we store your email (for account recovery), an anonymous user ID, and your purchase history (so we can restore premium on other devices).
If you opt in to analytics during onboarding, we collect anonymous usage data — which screens you use most, how often you swipe, basic crash reports — to help us improve the app. This is fully optional and you can turn it off anytime in Settings.
We never collect: your contacts, your location, your photos, your microphone, or any personally identifiable health information.
No. We do not sell, rent, or share your personal data with advertisers, data brokers, or third parties. We never will. NameRoot is paid for by users who buy premium, not by selling data.
Personalization consent allows NameRoot to generate AI baby portraits for the names you view. The portraits are produced by a third-party AI image generation service. Enabling personalization tells us you're okay with us calling that service on your behalf to generate images for the cultural context of each name.
If you turn personalization OFF, we won't call any AI image generation services and you'll see a default placeholder portrait instead of a custom one. Everything else in NameRoot works normally.
Open NameRoot → Settings → Account → Delete Account. Confirm the action and your account, favorites, preferences, and any synced data will be permanently deleted from our servers within 30 days.
Note: account deletion does not refund any premium purchase. If you want a refund, request it through the App Store or Google Play first, then delete your account.
You can also delete your account by emailing dinosdev1986@gmail.com from the email address associated with your account.
Yes. NameRoot is built with privacy-first principles aligned to the EU's GDPR and India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act. All consent toggles default to OFF until you explicitly enable them. You have the right to access, correct, export, and delete your personal data at any time.
For data subject requests (access, correction, export, deletion), email dinosdev1986@gmail.com.
Local data lives on your device. Cloud-synced data (if you sign in) lives on enterprise-grade, GDPR-compliant cloud infrastructure (Google Cloud / Firebase). The specific region depends on the platform's routing — typically the closest data center to you.
Heritage, traditions, and cultural sensitivity.
NameRoot launched with 13 religions and 23 ethnicities. We only show options that have enough names in our corpus to give you a satisfying experience — currently a minimum of 80 names per option. As we add more names through user requests and content updates, more options will become visible.
If your tradition isn't represented, please email us — we prioritize new corpus batches based on user demand. You can also pick "Other" in the meantime, which gives you access to the full corpus without religious filtering.
Yes — please use the search feature in the app and tap "Request this name" if it's not found. Every requested name goes into our corpus expansion queue, and we add the most-requested names in our monthly updates.
Many names cross cultures with different meanings. For example, "Sara" means "princess" in Hebrew, "pure" in Arabic, and "essence" in Sanskrit. We show the meaning that's most relevant to your selected religion and ethnicity, with alternative meanings listed below.
For mixed-heritage families, you can browse without filters to see names from any background and compare how a name carries across cultures.
We use a multi-layer safety system. Every name in our corpus is reviewed for cultural appropriateness, religious sensitivity, and age-suitability. Names that have negative meanings in major languages, that share their spelling with profanity, or that have associations with historical figures of harm are flagged or excluded. Nicknames are filtered through three independent safety layers including a multilingual profanity blocklist.
If you ever see a name suggestion that feels inappropriate, please report it from the name detail screen.
Yes. If you enter your baby's expected or actual birth date and select Hindu as your religion, NameRoot calculates the nakshatra and recommends names whose starting akshar (syllable) aligns with traditional Vedic guidelines. The nakshatra signal becomes one of the six signals in the name's score.
If you don't want nakshatra-based scoring, simply leave the birth date field blank.
When something isn't working.
Try these steps in order:
If none of these work, email dinosdev1986@gmail.com with your phone model, OS version, and a description of when the crash happens.
NameRoot is optimized for phones from the last 5 years. Older devices may experience slower swipe animations or longer portrait load times. The most common cause of slowness is low storage space — try clearing some space if your phone is more than 90% full.
If you're on a recent phone and still seeing slowness, please report it.
If you were signed in with Google, your favorites are backed up to the cloud. Sign in again on the app and they should restore automatically.
If you weren't signed in and your favorites are gone, they were stored locally only and we can't recover them. We strongly recommend signing in with Google to prevent this — it's free, takes 5 seconds, and protects your work.
Most likely your filters are too restrictive. If you've selected a very specific combination (e.g., a religion + ethnicity + gender + filter "skip common names"), NameRoot may have run out of names that match.
Try widening your filters: in Settings, set ethnicity to "Other" or remove religion temporarily. You'll see more variety. You can re-tighten the filters once you have a sense of what you like.
Check your phone's volume and silent mode. Pronunciation requires an internet connection on first play (we download the audio file once and cache it). If you tap the speaker and nothing happens, you may have lost connection — try again on Wi-Fi.
Help us make NameRoot better.
Open the name detail screen and tap the "⋯" menu in the top right, then choose "Report this name" or "Report image". Select what's wrong (incorrect meaning, inappropriate image, offensive name, other) and add a brief explanation. Your report goes directly to our content moderation queue and is usually reviewed within 48 hours.
We love feedback. Email dinosdev1986@gmail.com with the subject line "Feature request" and tell us what you'd like to see. We read every message personally and many features in NameRoot today started as user suggestions.
Yes — please do. Reviews on the Apple App Store and Google Play help other parents discover NameRoot and help us improve. From the app, go to Settings → "Rate NameRoot" or visit your platform's store listing directly.
If something's wrong, please email us first so we can fix it. A 5-star review with feedback in the comments helps us more than a 1-star review without context.
Email dinosdev1986@gmail.com for anything. NameRoot is built by a small team and we read every message. Response time is typically within 24 hours, often faster for urgent issues like billing or account access.