Names by tradition

Language and faith are two different axes, and most name sites only offer one of them.

Someone looking for a Hindu name is not asking for Sanskrit, even though most Hindu names are Sanskrit in origin — they are also asking about Tamil, Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati forms, and they are not asking for the Sanskrit vocabulary that Buddhism and Jainism draw on just as heavily. Someone looking for a Muslim name is not asking for Arabic: the Arabic core reached Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Malay, Swahili and Hausa, and a Turkish Muslim family and an Indonesian one are drawing on a shared religious vocabulary through completely unrelated languages.

These pages sort the library the second way. Each groups the names by the language they came from, so you can see how far a tradition has travelled and what it picked up on the way.

A caution worth stating plainly

A tradition here is the cultural context a name is used in. It is not a claim about anybody's beliefs, and it is not a fence.

A great many of these names are shared. Maryam is a Muslim name, a Christian name and a Jewish name, because all three traditions are reading about the same women. Arab Christians have used Arabic names for as long as Arab Muslims have. Sanskrit names are used by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs, and by families who are none of those things. Names cross faith lines far more freely than the categories on this page might suggest, and appearing on one list does not remove a name from any other.

Where a name is genuinely specific to one tradition — because it names a scriptural figure, or a concept with no equivalent elsewhere — the individual entry says so.