Your name in Devanagari

Where a Devanagari spelling can still be wrong

Devanagari is the pivot every other script is converted from, so there is no second stage here to lose anything: these are the spellings our engine produced, unaltered. Everything that can be wrong on this page was decided when the romanised name was read, which is the section below — and it is the same first stage behind all ten scripts.

How the conversion works, and where it loses

There are two stages, and this page only uses the first. The romanised name becomes Devanagari through our own syllable engine — no free library does romanised-to-Devanagari acceptably, so we wrote one. The second stage, Devanagari into the other eight scripts, is @indic-transliteration/sanscript, and it does not run here. Everything is offline. There is no API behind it, which is why every published name could be rendered rather than a sample.

That first stage is where the guessing lives, and it guesses because a romanised Indian name genuinely underdetermines its spelling. “Rita” is रीता for one family and ऋता for another, and nothing in the four letters says which. A trailing lone “a” is read as the long ā, because Priya is प्रिया far more often than प्रिय. A nasal before a stop is written as anusvara — संजय, not सन्जय — but not before y, r, l or v, which is why Ananya stays अनन्या. Each of those is a rule that is usually right and sometimes wrong.

Across 536 published names, 25 groups of romanised spellings arrive at one Devanagari spelling.

If a spelling here is not the one your family uses, your family is the authority and we are not. The pipeline reconstructs a likely Devanagari form from roman letters; it does not know your name. Take the spelling as a starting point for the certificate or the invitation, and correct it.

Questions people ask

How do I write my name in Hindi?

The table on this page carries 120 published names already written out in Devanagari. If a name is not among them, the check on the home page runs the same two-stage conversion on any name you type: the romanised spelling becomes Devanagari through our own syllable engine, and the Devanagari becomes Devanagari. It runs offline and returns all ten Indian scripts at once, not just this one.

Is this the spelling a Hindi speaker would use?

This is the spelling our engine produced, and Devanagari is where it stops rather than a script it was converted into, so nothing was lost on the way. What can still be wrong is the reading it chose: a romanised name does not fully determine its Devanagari, and the engine picks the likelier form. Your family's spelling is the authority and ours is a draft.

Which languages are written in the Devanagari script?

Hindi (about 52.8 crore first-language speakers in India at the 2011 census, official language of the Union alongside English, and the state language of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Delhi); Marathi (about 8.3 crore first-language speakers in India at the 2011 census, state language of Maharashtra). Sanskrit, Nepali, Konkani, Maithili, Dogri and Bodo are all written in Devanagari.

Why does a name here look different from the way my family writes it?

Because the conversion starts from roman letters, and roman letters lose the distinctions Devanagari makes. “Rita” is रीता in one family and ऋता in another, and the spelling cannot tell you which. In this corpus 25 groups of romanised spellings arrive at the same Devanagari for exactly that reason. We publish the likelier reading and say so. For a certificate or an invitation, treat it as a draft your family corrects.