Pali names

📖About Pali names

This page collects every Pali first name in the NameRarity index — 11 in total, 3 given to girls and 7 given to boys. Each one carries its meaning, pronunciation, rarity score, numerology reading and the lucky number and colour traditionally attached to it.

Pali names in this collection average a rarity score of 88 out of 100. 10 of them score 70 or above, which puts them among the genuinely uncommon — Kanthaka is the rarest here at 98/100, meaning roughly one person in 833,333 carries it. 1 appears in recent US top-1000 rankings.

They run from Bodhi at 5 letters to Sanghamitra at 11, so there is room to pick for sound and length as well as meaning. The qualities these names most often carry are quiet, kind, cheerful and loyal. Their strongest periods of use span 5 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 Pali 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. Pali 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. Kanthaka means “Name of the white horse that carried Siddhartha from the palace”, for instance, while Bodhi means “Awakening, enlightenment, the tree under which the Buddha awoke”. 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.