Baby Name API & Open Dataset

A free JSON API over 219,846 given names covering 28 countries and territories, 26 of them with official statistics-agency or civil-registry data (India and Japan publish no national ranking, so those come from compiled surveys and are labelled as such), spanning 1880–2025. Start with no signup; a free key raises your limits.

Figures are read live from the database, not hand-maintained. Last refreshed within 12 hours.

Quick start

No signup needed to start. Every endpoint is a plain GET returning JSON:

curl "https://babynamesuggestion.com/wp-json/bns/v1/names/Olivia"

Or filter the whole dataset:

curl "https://babynamesuggestion.com/wp-json/bns/v1/names?per_page=5&gender=F&region=IN&sort=rank"

A free key raises your limits and unlocks name meanings — see below. Send it as a header X-API-Key: your_key or as ?api_key=your_key.

Access tiers

Tiers grant query breadth, never corpus portability. Everyone can ask questions; nobody gets a bulk export.

Two budgets, metered separately — and the difference matters when you pick a tier.

• Name lookups (/names/{name}, /trend, /states) — one name per call, for names you already have. This is what most integrations actually run on, so it is the budget we are generous with.
• List queries (/names, /search, /popular, /trending) — many names per call, for discovery and browsing. Deliberately the tighter budget: it is how a dataset walks out of the door.

Each response tells you where you stand: X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining and X-RateLimit-Budget (lookup or list), so a 429 never leaves you guessing which budget to ease off.

Get a free key

Instant, no approval step. We use the address to tell you about breaking changes — nothing else.

Need commercial access, higher limits, or a licence conversation? Get in touch — we price it per project rather than running a self-serve checkout.

Endpoints

Base URL: https://babynamesuggestion.com/wp-json/bns/v1

Where the data comes from

Every figure traces back to a named source. Most are national statistical agencies publishing open data; each row links to the original so you can verify any number yourself, or go straight to the primary source when you need to cite it.

Licence & citation

Two different things live in this dataset, and they carry different rights. We are explicit about that rather than claiming a blanket licence we are not in a position to grant.

• Our compilation — the API, the unified schema, our name meanings, origins and derived fields. Whatever your tier returns to you is free to use, including commercially, with attribution to babynamesuggestion.com. That grant covers the data you receive through the API; it is not a right to redistribute the corpus as a dataset of its own.
• The underlying registry figures — birth counts and ranks belong to the statistical agencies listed above, each under its own terms. We do not own them and cannot relicense them. If you republish those figures, cite the originating agency as well as us.
• Name meanings are partly AI-assisted and are labelled as such on the site wherever they have not been human-verified. Treat them as a compiled reference, not a peer-reviewed etymological authority.

Suggested citation

babynamesuggestion.com Baby Name Dataset (2026).
219,846 given names from 34 sources, 1880-2025.
https://babynamesuggestion.com/baby-name-api/

Limits, and what happens when you hit one

• Every response carries X-RateLimit-Limit and X-RateLimit-Remaining, so you never have to guess where you stand.
• Over the limit returns HTTP 429 with a Retry-After header in seconds. It is a plain, documented refusal — not a silent truncation or an empty array.
• Past the page ceiling returns HTTP 400 explaining the ceiling. Narrow the query with filters instead of paging deeper.
• An unrecognised or revoked key returns HTTP 401 rather than quietly downgrading you to anonymous, so a typo in your key is never mistaken for missing data.
• Cache what you fetch, and tell us if your project takes off so we can plan capacity rather than discover it from a load spike.

Get in touch about bulk access or a project using this data →