If you’ve ever taken part in a brainstorming session or played word association games, the Brainstormer should feel pretty natural to you.

Brainstorming is based on the principle of association—one idea suggests another, which leads to another and so on. 

Baby Name Brainstorm was designed along these lines. It helps you generate name ideas by finding associations between a name you already like, and others which you might not have thought of yet.

Here’s how it works…

The graph

Names are presented in an interactive graph which shows connections or associations between names in our database.

Every node in the graph is either a name or an association. Name nodes are coloured according to the gender of the name: blue for boy names, pink for girl names. The grey nodes are associations. Associations provide a means to find names which are similar to the current focus name in some way. 

The Brainstormer finds name potentials through various associations such as 'sounds like'

The focus

At any given time, the graph has a ‘focus’ which is the name or association you last clicked on. This node appears at the centre of the graph. Nodes which are related to the focus fan out from it in all directions.

Each name in the graph is the centre of its own associative space

Navigation

Using the association nodes you can move through the graph from one name to another. At each step you are be presented with name suggestions which are similar in some way to the last name you selected.

Associations

There are currently three kinds of association available: contains, found in and sounds like.

Contains

The Contains Association finds names from character sequences in the focus name

The contains association finds any names which within character sequences of the focus name. For example, the name Alexandre contains the following smaller names: Alex, Andre, Alexa, Le, An, Lex, Lexa, André and Dré. Contains is useful for finding distinctive sounds within a name that may also appear in other names. Note that contains will not return just any sequence of characters from a name: only sequences that are already listed in the database as legitimate names. So, for instance, you will not find Exan in Alexandre.

Found In

The Found In Association finds names which include the current focus name within them

Found in is the inverse of contains; it will find any names in the database which include the focus name within them. For short names such as An and Le, this can be quite an extensive list. Currently, the graph will display a maximum of 20 direct neighbours for a given node.

Sounds Like

The Sounds Like Association finds names with similar phonetics to the focus name

The Sounds like association will find names which are deemed to be phonetically similar to the focus name. This is an excellent way of discovering new ideas and variations on a name such as alternative spellings or suffixes.

Random association

The Random Association seeds the graph with a random selection of names from the database

If you select a name that is particularly unique and has few direct neighbours you may find the associations start to run dry. If that happens you can use the Random button in the upper right corner of the screen to find a fresh batch of names begin a new brainstorm.

Future developments

The current focus of the tool is on spellings and phonetics. But we have plans to introduce other associations based on aspects such as word meanings and origins. Check back with us soon for more toys.

Choosing a name for your child is a wonderful opportunity but it can be daunting. That’s why we developed Baby Name Brainstorm: an inspiring and fun way to explore your naming preferences and discover creative and unexpected name possibilities.