Nature Name Generator

How this list was compiled: A list built on 3 October 2026 from two records. (1) The Social Security Administration's national file of first names on US birth records (names.zip, linked from https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html; ssa.gov refuses scripted downloads, so the official zip was read from the Internet Archive's copy captured 2026-09-18, https://web.archive.org/web/20260918154125/https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/names.zip): a name is listed only if at least 5 girls or 5 boys got it in 2025, the newest year in the file, and the counts on a card are that year's. (2) English Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org, read the same day): the name, written without its capital, must be an English word that the dictionary files under a nature topic, such as Flowers, Gems, Landforms, Atmospheric phenomena, Corvids or Cypress family plants. How the names were found: all 2,626 names with 150 births or more in 2025 were looked up, and below that floor a list of 398 nature words we wrote. Then one reader went through the matches, kept the words whose nature sense is a plain, current sense of the word, and set the group by the sense most readers know; that reading is a judgment, not a rule. Taken out at that reading, as examples: Jack (filed under fish and fruit trees), Lucy (a pike), Benjamin (a fig tree), Luna (a moth in English), Timothy (a grass), Martin and Maggie (birds). That leaves 204 names in six groups. It is not every nature name: a word the dictionary files under no nature topic is missing even if it belongs (Meadow and Brooks are two), and so is any name spelled differently from the word (Skye, Brooke). Given mostly to girls, or to boys, means that sex has 90 in every 100 of the name's 2025 births; the rest are listed for both. The file counts every spelling as its own name and lists a name only from 5 births a year for a sex. Licence: Counts: the Social Security file is a work of the US federal government, in the public domain (17 U.S.C. 105). Which words are nature words: English Wiktionary's topic categories, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). The six groups and the selection are our own work.