Building a Multilingual Baby Name Database: Lessons from 40+ Origins and 1,500 Names

I've been building BabyNamePick.com — a baby name database that now covers 1,500+ names from over 40 cultural origins. Here's what I learned about data modeling, cultural sensitivity, and scaling a name database. The Data Model Each name entry looks like this: { "name": "Saoirse", "meaning": "Freedom", "origin": "irish", "gender": "girl", "styles": ["strong", "cultural"] } Simple, but the decisions behind each field were not. Origin: One String, Many Debates Names don't respect borders. Is "Jasmine" Persian, Arabic, or English? We went with the earliest traceable origin (Persian), but added style tags to capture cross-cultural usage. Some origin categories we use: Geographic: japanese, korean, irish, welsh Cultural: biblical, native-american, polynesian Language-family: slavic, nordic The key insight: origin is about etymology, styles are about usage. A name can be Irish in origin but popular in America. Gender: Beyond Binary We use four values: boy, girl, unisex, neutral. The differen