Kannada names

📖About Kannada names

This page collects every Kannada first name in the NameRarity index — 8 in total, 2 given to girls and 6 given to boys. Each one carries its meaning, pronunciation, rarity score, numerology reading and the lucky number and colour traditionally attached to it.

Kannada names in this collection average a rarity score of 83 out of 100. 8 of them score 70 or above, which puts them among the genuinely uncommon — Basavaraj is the rarest here at 93/100, meaning roughly one person in 526,316 carries it. None currently appear in the US top 1,000, which is a large part of why they score so highly for rarity.

They run from Dinesh at 6 letters to Basavaraj at 9, so there is room to pick for sound and length as well as meaning. The qualities these names most often carry are loyal, principled, steady and patient. Their strongest periods of use span 6 different eras.

Rarity here is a score out of 100 built from how often a name is actually recorded: a high score means few people share it, a low score means it is well established. Neither is better than the other — a rare name stands out in a classroom, a common one never needs spelling out. Open any name below for its full reading.

✦Choosing a Kannada name

Say the name out loud before anything else. A name lives in speech far more than on paper, and the pronunciation guide on each page is there so you can hear it the way it is meant to sound rather than guessing from the spelling. Try it with the surname it will sit beside, and try the shortened form people will inevitably use — if the short form is one you would not choose yourself, that is worth knowing early.

Then look at the meaning. Kannada names in this list carry meanings that range from the concrete to the poetic, and the meaning is usually the reason a family settles on one. Basavaraj means “King of bulls, after the reformer-saint Basavanna”, for instance, while Dinesh means “Lord of the day, an epithet of the sun”. Two names can sound similar and mean entirely different things, so it is worth reading the entry rather than going on sound alone.

Finally, decide how much rarity you actually want. A score above 70 means the name will almost always be the only one in the room, which some people love and others find tiring to spell out for a lifetime. A score under 40 means it is familiar, easy to spell and easy to carry. Everything between is the middle ground most families end up choosing. Whichever way you lean, every entry below gives you the number so you are deciding with the figure in front of you rather than a hunch.