Building a Baby Name Search That Handles Starting Letters Well

When parents know they want a name starting with a specific letter, they need a fast way to browse. Here's how we built letter-based search for BabyNamePick . Why Letter-Based Browsing Matters A surprising number of parents start their name search with a letter. Maybe they want siblings with matching initials, or they have a family tradition of J-names. Our analytics showed names starting with J are the most searched letter category. The Implementation Rather than a simple alphabetical filter, we built a system that considers: 1. Cultural Distribution Not every letter is equally represented across cultures. J-names are abundant in English and Spanish but rare in Chinese or Thai. Our filter shows the cultural breakdown so parents understand what they're browsing. // Group names by origin for each letter const letterGroups = names . filter ( n => n . name . startsWith ( letter )) . reduce (( acc , name ) => { acc [ name . origin ] = ( acc [ name . origin ] || []). concat ( name ); return