Craft is source hygiene: two independent references, a language named, a “perhaps” left in when scholars leave it in.
Delete any step that assigns a score to a stroke or a star.
Steps
- 1Name the language
Hebrew, Old English, Sino-Korean, invented.
No language, no etymology.
- 2Open a real dictionary
Hanks, language academies, scholarly onomastica.
Not the first ad result.
- 3Separate gloss from hope
“Grace” as history vs “she will be graceful.”
Only the first is etymology.
- 4Check other languages
A fine English gloss can be a rude word elsewhere.
Cheap disaster prevention.
- 5Record the family story
The living meaning may be a grandmother, not a root.
Both can be true in different senses.
- 6Stop before luck
If the next tab is stroke count, you have left the page.
Hard stop.
Checklist
- Source named — Author, year, language.
- Uncertainty kept — “Perhaps” is a feature.
- Folk story labelled — Legend ≠ derivation.
- Hanja/kanji as description — Virtue hopes OK; fate charts not.
- No trait leap — Root ≠ psychology.
- Fashion checked separately — SSA/ONS do not measure meaning.
- Bias checked separately — Emily/Lakisha is not etymology.
- Child could hear this story — If you would not say it at 15, do not file it as meaning.
Pitfalls
- One-line certainty — “It means warrior. Period.”
- Mixing scripts as magic — A kanji plus a Hebrew root is two histories, not a combo spell.
- DNA-kit surname myths — A haplogroup is not an etymology.
- Back-forming a meaning to match a celebrity — Folk etymology on a deadline.
Tools
- Dictionary of First Names (Hanks) — A starting scholarly-popular source.
- Language-specific onomastica — Better for Korean, Arabic, Yoruba, etc.
- Etymological dictionaries — For the roots behind the name words.
- This atlas’s character-names page — For hanja/kanji/generation systems.
A meaning you can footnote is a gift. A meaning that predicts a salary is a scam.