Your name in Tamil

What Tamil cannot keep

Tamil has a smaller consonant inventory than Devanagari, and 3 sets of letters land on a single letter here. This is the script working correctly, not a conversion fault — but it does mean a Tamil spelling carries less information than the Devanagari it came from, and cannot always be read back.

Sounds Tamil has no letter for

1 Devanagari letter has no Tamil letter of its own. What comes out is the nearest spelling the script can build — a consonant carrying a vowel sign — which reads correctly aloud but is not a letter-for-letter match.

Names Tamil spells the same way

Different names in Devanagari, one spelling here. 4 such groups across the published corpus.

Names we will not render in Tamil

4 published names. The conversion left Devanagari characters behind, which means the script has no letter for a sound in the name. We drop the rendering rather than print something that is not Tamil.

How the conversion works, and where it loses

There are two stages. First the romanised name becomes Devanagari, using our own syllable engine — no free library does romanised-to-Devanagari acceptably, so we wrote one. Then Devanagari becomes Tamil through the Brahmic-to-Brahmic conversion in @indic-transliteration/sanscript, which is accurate because the two scripts descend from the same system. Everything runs offline. There is no API behind it, which is why every name on this page could be rendered rather than a sample.

The second stage is the well-behaved one. The first 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, and therefore at one Tamil spelling. This happens before any script is chosen, so it is not something Tamil did.

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 Tamil?

The table on this page carries 120 published names already written out in Tamil. 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 Tamil. It runs offline and returns all ten Indian scripts at once, not just this one.

Is this the spelling a Tamil speaker would use?

Usually, with the caveats this page is explicit about. Tamil writes त, द, ध and थ as த; क, ग, ख and घ as க; प, ब, भ and फ as ப. A spelling here therefore carries less information than the Devanagari behind it. ऋ has no Tamil letter at all, and comes out spelled as ரு. Across the published corpus that makes 4 groups of distinct names come out identical. Where the conversion cannot represent a sound at all we drop the rendering rather than print broken text.

Which languages are written in the Tamil script?

Tamil (about 6.9 crore first-language speakers in India at the 2011 census, official in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, and a national language of Sri Lanka and Singapore). Declared a classical language of India in 2004.

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.