What can ALL of our letters become?

Are you in a relationship? There may be a message in your names.

Nobody chooses the letters they are given. Yours were decided before you could speak. Theirs were decided somewhere else entirely, by people who had never met yours. And then, years later, the two of you ended up in the same room.

Put those names together and something quietly strange happens. They stop being two names and become one set of letters. And inside that set, sometimes, there is a word. A phrase. Something that reads as though it was meant.

We take every letter from both of you. First names, middle names, surnames, whatever you give us, and nothing else. Nothing is added. Nothing is borrowed from anywhere. Whatever surfaces was already inside the two of you before you arrived here.

Then we listen in three languages — English, French and Spanish — because a thing that stays silent in one will sometimes speak in another.

Most of what returns is gentle and ordinary. Some of it is not. And once in a while, very rarely, every letter falls into place at once and there is nothing left over at all.

When every letter falls into place

Once in a while two names give up everything they have. Every letter, used exactly once. Nothing added, nothing left behind.

We call it a Complete Match, and most names do not hold one. It has nothing to do with how much you love each other. It is a question of which letters the two of you were handed at birth, and whether they happen to fit.

When your names hold one, we will show you, and you can count the letters yourself.

When they do not, we will tell you that plainly. Our search is deep but it has an end, so finding nothing is not the same as proving there is nothing. We would rather leave you with silence than hand you something we invented.

How it works

1. Give us two names.
2. Choose what you are listening for — Romantic, Spiritual, or leave it open to Surprise.
3. Choose the language you would like to lead with.
4. See what surfaces, free.
5. Open the full reading for £1.

What can surface

• Words waiting inside your letters, including the long and unlikely ones.
• Pairings that mean something together, not merely words side by side.
• Phrases, fragments, and where your letters allow it, a whole sentence.
• Names out of history, people and places, when your letters happen to hold one.
• The unexpected: things neither of you would have thought to look for.
• And rarest of all, a Complete Match, which most readings do not have.

Nothing reaches you that your two names did not already contain. If a word would need a letter you did not give us, it is left behind, however beautiful it would have looked.

The words we listen with

Our English vocabulary comes from Princeton WordNet (WordNet 3.0, Copyright 2006 by Princeton University, all rights reserved), ordered by how often words are really used, drawn from the wordfreq project under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. Our filter for coarse language uses Shutterstock’s list under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Our French and Spanish are written by hand, word by word. We tried machine-translated dictionaries first and threw them away. They were confidently wrong often enough that we would have been printing mistakes onto something somebody meant to keep. A smaller vocabulary we can vouch for is worth more than a large one we cannot.

What do our names hold?

That is the question this place exists to answer, and the only honest reply is that it depends entirely on your letters. Two names usually give us thirty to fifty of them. That is a deep pool. Deep enough for a great many words, a fair number of phrases, and now and then something neither of you saw coming.

Whether they can hold a single thing made of every letter is a different and much harder question. Shorter names manage it more often, because every extra letter is another that has to find somewhere to belong. One awkward letter with nothing to pair it with can close the door on its own.

If your full names hold nothing, first names alone often will. It is worth asking twice.

Frequently asked questions

Is there really something hidden in a name?

There is certainly something in one. A name is a fixed set of letters, chosen for you before you had any say, and every set of letters can be read more than one way. Put two names together and the possibilities multiply. Whether what surfaces means anything is yours to decide. We only show you what is genuinely there.

What if our names hold nothing?

Then we say so. Most name pairs do not hold anything remarkable, and we would rather tell you that than invent something to fill the quiet. It is not a verdict on the two of you. It is a fact about letters.

Does this tell us whether we are compatible?

No, and we would not trust anything that claimed to. What we find is a coincidence of letters, sometimes a beautiful one. What you make of it is yours. Some people find it says something true. Others find it says nothing at all. Both are fair.

Can I do this for a relationship that has ended?

Yes, and many people do. The letters do not know whether you are still together. Some of the most striking readings we have seen came from names that stopped being said in the same sentence a long time ago.

Why three languages?

Because letters do not respect borders. A set that holds nothing much in English will occasionally hold something lovely in French or Spanish, and it would be a shame to miss it because of where you happen to live. We look in all three on every reading, whichever one you choose to lead with, and we translate anything we find. Accents are treated as their base letters when we look — é and e count as the same letter — and anything we show you carries its correct spelling.

Do you ever add a letter to make something work?

Never. Every result is measured against your two names before you see it, letter by letter. If it needs something you did not give us, it is discarded — not adjusted, not shown with a note attached. That happens on every result, every time, and it is the whole reason a result here is worth anything.

Can the same two names hold more than one thing?

Usually, yes. A set of letters can be arranged many ways, and where we find more than one strong reading we show you all of them.

Does it work for anyone other than couples?

It works for any two names. Parents and children, sisters, old friends, a person and the place they come from. The letters are simply letters. Most people come with a partner, but nothing here requires it.