Baby-name apps have a trust problem. Most of them ship thousands of names with meanings that were copied from another app that copied them from a forum, and a good number of those meanings are simply wrong. For a Muslim parent a name’s meaning is the child’s first dua — it should be checkable. Ismi is the names app built on that one rule: nothing is invented, and every meaning shows where it came from.
Swipe, shortlist, match
The deck shows one name at a time: Arabic script, an easy transliteration, the meaning, the source. Swipe right to shortlist, left to pass, tap to read more. Filters for gender, origin and category never reset your swipe history.
Invite your partner with a code and you each swipe on your own phone. A name you both swipe right on becomes a match — usually the moment the screenshot gets sent to the family group.
565 names with a verified Quran citation
Where a name occurs in the Quran, the card shows the chapter and verse. Every one of those citations was checked against the Quranic Arabic Corpus rather than copied, and a name whose Arabic merely looks like a Quranic word — a homograph — doesn’t get one. The post about building Ismi explains the pipeline, including the names that were rejected.
Meanings with a source, not a vibe
Each meaning is either hand-written or taken from a published dictionary entry for the Arabic root, and the card says which. Where scholars differ about a name, the card shows both positions with their sources and no verdict. Category labels — Quranic, Prophets, Sahaba, Ahl al-Bayt, “Abdul-” names — are descriptive, never doctrinal.
Browse however you think about names
By Quranic tier, by prophets and companions, by the 99 names of Allah, by origin (Arabic, Persian, Turkish), by what’s trending in the Gulf, or by one of sixteen meaning themes: Light, Mercy, Strength, Beauty, Faith, Knowledge, Joy, Love, Truth, Generosity, Patience, Paradise, Nature, Moon & Stars, Royal, Virtue.
Search works in English or Arabic.
”Travels well in English”
A rating no other names app has. Every name is scored for how easily an English speaker can say and spell it, so a family in Manchester or Toronto can pick something that is beautiful in Arabic and painless at school. Filter by it if it matters to you; ignore it if it doesn’t.
Your shortlist
Pin favourites, drag to rank the final few, hear the pronunciation, and share a card for the name you choose.
No ads, offline, twenty languages
Interstitial ads are the number-one complaint in reviews of competing apps, so Ismi has none — not one, and no analytics either. Everything ships inside the app and works in airplane mode. The interface is available in twenty languages including full right-to-left Arabic, Urdu and Persian.
Ismi (اسمي) means “my name”. May yours be blessed.
