All 27 nakshatras and their pada syllables

Why a pandit gives you a letter rather than a name

The Moon crosses the whole zodiac in about twenty-seven days, which is where the twenty-seven stars come from: one for each day of that circuit, each 13°20′ wide. At a namkaran the pandit reads the Moon's longitude at the moment of birth from the janam kundli, which fixes the star and then, more finely, which quarter of it the Moon occupied. That quarter is the pada, and each pada carries a syllable the child's name traditionally begins with.

The convention is practical as much as it is astrological. A syllable is a constraint a whole family can work inside — grandparents, parents and a priest can agree on “it starts with Chu” long before they agree on a name — and it keeps the name tied to the chart rather than to fashion, which is the point of the ceremony. It is a convention rather than a rule: a name outside the four syllables is not an incorrect name.

Questions families ask

How many nakshatras are there, and what is a pada?

Twenty-seven, dividing the sidereal zodiac into equal arcs of 13°20′ each. Every one is quartered further into four padas of 3°20′, which makes 108 padas in all, and each pada carries one syllable. A pada is roughly six hours of the Moon's motion, which is why a recorded birth time changes the answer so often.

I was given a syllable at the namkaran. Which star is it from?

Look it up in the syllable index on this page: all 108 are listed alphabetically with the star, the pada and the moon sign each belongs to. The star pages then list the published names beginning with that sound. A handful of syllables appear under more than one pada, and where that happens both are listed rather than one being picked.

Can this page tell me my child's nakshatra?

No, and nothing that starts from the name can. The birth star comes from where the Moon actually was at birth, which needs the birth date and ideally the birth time. Enter those in the name check and we compute the Moon's position; these pages run the table the other way, from a sound to the stars that carry it, which is the direction that helps once a name is already in mind.

Why do some stars list no names?

Because no published name in our corpus begins with any of their four syllables yet. The count is recomputed on every build, so a star gets its page the moment the corpus covers one of its sounds. Our matching also folds long vowels onto short ones — Aarav and Arav both read as “A” — so a pada written with a doubled vowel can only be reached by a spelling we do not currently publish.