Kundli Matching by Name — What a name can genuinely tell you about compatibility — and the 15 points it can never reach

A name maps to a nakshatra through the traditional pada syllable, and four of the eight kootas are computed from nakshatra alone. So name-only matching reaches exactly 21 of 36 points. The remaining 15 need a Moon sign, which no name contains.

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What a name can genuinely tell you about compatibility — and the 15 points it can never reach.

Kundli matching by name is the most searched form of matching and the least honestly explained. Most tools that offer it either quietly invent a birth time, or return a percentage with no stated basis at all. Both are guesses wearing a number.

The tradition behind it is real, though narrower than the marketing implies. Every one of the 27 nakshatras is divided into four padas, and each pada carries a traditional starting syllable — the namakshar. A child named on that syllable can be worked backwards: the syllable identifies the pada, the pada identifies the nakshatra. That is a genuine, checkable mapping, and it is the only thing a name supplies.

It matters because nakshatra is not a minor input. Four of the eight kootas — Tara, Yoni, Gana and Nadi — are computed from nakshatra and nothing else. Together they are worth 21 of the 36 points, and they include the two largest single kootas in the system. So a name-only match is not worthless. It is precisely 21 points wide, and we can show you which ones.

The 21 points a name can reach

Four kootas depend on nakshatra alone. Those four, and only those four, survive without a birth date.

We verified this against the engine rather than assuming it. Holding two nakshatras fixed and varying the Moon signs across all 144 possible sign combinations, the Tara + Yoni + Gana + Nadi subtotal never moved: one distinct value across all 144 runs. Those four kootas genuinely do not read the sign.

The converse check is on the sibling page: holding two signs fixed and varying nakshatras across all 729 combinations leaves the other four kootas equally unmoved. The 36 points really do split cleanly into a 21-point nakshatra half and a 15-point sign half, and a name gives you the first half only.

Koota	Max points	Computed from	Reachable from a name?
Tara	3	Nakshatra distance, both directions	Yes
Yoni	4	Nakshatra → yoni animal, 14×14 matrix	Yes
Gana	6	Nakshatra → Deva / Manushya / Rakshasa	Yes
Nadi	8	Nakshatra → Adi / Madhya / Antya	Yes
Varna	1	Moon sign → varna rank	No
Vashya	2	Moon sign → vashya class	No
Graha Maitri	5	Moon sign lords → friendship table	No
Bhakoot	7	Distance between Moon signs	No

Reachable total: 21 of 36. The four unreachable kootas are worth 15, and no amount of name analysis recovers them.

Where the syllable map is ambiguous — a census, not an estimate

The 27 nakshatras carry 108 pada slots. Those 108 slots hold only 95 distinct syllables.

Because the same syllable can appear in more than one pada, running the map backwards is not always single-valued. We counted it: of the 95 distinct syllables, 83 resolve to exactly one nakshatra, and 12 span two different nakshatras. On those 12, a name alone cannot decide which of the two you were born under — and the two candidates often sit in different nadi and gana groups, which is where the largest points live.

This is the part that gets hidden. A tool that returns a single confident score from a name beginning with "Di" has silently picked Ashlesha or Purva Bhadrapada for you. Those two are in different nadi groups, so the choice is worth 8 points on its own. We would rather show you the fork.

Syllable	Candidate nakshatra A	Candidate nakshatra B
Da	Pushya	Purva Bhadrapada
Di	Ashlesha	Purva Bhadrapada
Du	Ashlesha	Uttara Bhadrapada
De	Ashlesha	Revati
Do	Ashlesha	Revati
Ta	Purva Phalguni	Swati
Ti	Purva Phalguni	Vishakha
Tu	Purva Phalguni	Vishakha
Te	Uttara Phalguni	Vishakha
To	Uttara Phalguni	Vishakha
Na	Hasta	Anuradha
Tha	Hasta	Uttara Bhadrapada

All 12 cross-nakshatra collisions in the 108-slot table. The other 83 syllables are unambiguous at nakshatra level.

The assumption underneath all of it

Everything above assumes the name was actually given on the birth nakshatra syllable. In practice that is a minority of people. Namakaran naming is still followed in many families, but plenty of names are chosen for a grandparent, a meaning, a film, or nothing in particular — and a legal name may differ from the naming-ceremony name entirely.

When the name was not chosen from the chart, the syllable identifies a nakshatra that is simply not yours, and the 21 points computed from it describe two people who do not exist. There is no way to detect this from the name. It is the single largest source of error in name matching, and it is not a rounding error — it replaces the input wholesale.

So the honest framing is conditional: if both names were given on the birth nakshatra, a name match gives you a real 21-point reading. If they were not, it gives you a real 21-point reading of the wrong two people. We tell you which assumption you are relying on rather than burying it.

The 27 nakshatras and their four pada syllables

The full namakshar map, as used by the engine. Find the syllable your name begins with; the row is your candidate nakshatra and the column is the pada.

Nakshatra	Pada 1	Pada 2	Pada 3	Pada 4
Ashwini	Chu	Che	Cho	La
Bharani	Li	Lu	Le	Lo
Krittika	A	I	U	E
Rohini	O	Va	Vi	Vu
Mrigashira	Ve	Vo	Ka	Ki
Ardra	Ku	Gha	Nga	Chha
Punarvasu	Ke	Ko	Ha	Hi
Pushya	Hu	He	Ho	Da
Ashlesha	Di	Du	De	Do
Magha	Ma	Mi	Mu	Me
Purva Phalguni	Mo	Ta	Ti	Tu
Uttara Phalguni	Te	To	Pa	Pi
Hasta	Pu	Sha	Na	Tha
Chitra	Pe	Po	Ra	Ri
Swati	Ru	Re	Ro	Ta
Vishakha	Ti	Tu	Te	To
Anuradha	Na	Ni	Nu	Ne
Jyeshtha	No	Ya	Yi	Yu
Mula	Ye	Yo	Bha	Bhi
Purva Ashadha	Bhu	Dha	Pha	Dha
Uttara Ashadha	Bhe	Bho	Ja	Ji
Shravana	Khi	Khu	Khe	Kho
Dhanishta	Ga	Gi	Gu	Ge
Shatabhisha	Go	Sa	Si	Su
Purva Bhadrapada	Se	So	Da	Di
Uttara Bhadrapada	Du	Tha	Jha	Tra
Revati	De	Do	Cha	Chi

Purva Ashadha carries "Dha" in both pada 2 and pada 4 — the one within-nakshatra repeat, which is harmless because both padas point at the same nakshatra.

A name-only match, computed end to end

Two names, no dates. "Rohan" begins with Ro; "Meera" begins with Me. Both syllables are in the unambiguous 83, so each resolves to exactly one nakshatra. We then run only the four nakshatra-derived kootas.

Step	Value
Ro → pada lookup	Swati, pada 3 (nakshatra 15)
Me → pada lookup	Magha, pada 4 (nakshatra 10)
Tara — nakshatra distance both ways, mod 9	1.5 of 3 (good one way only)
Yoni — Swati (Mahisha) × Magha (Mushak)	2 of 4
Gana — Swati is Deva, Magha is Rakshasa	1 of 6
Nadi — Swati is Antya, Magha is Antya: same	0 of 8 (Nadi dosha)

4.5 of the 21 name-reachable points. The remaining 15 points are not low — they are absent.

A tool that reported this as "12.5%" or "4.5/36" would be misleading in opposite directions. It is 4.5 out of the 21 that names can reach, and the 15-point sign half is unknown, not zero. Note also that Tara returned 1.5, not an integer — several kootas in this system award half points.

Frequently asked

Can kundli matching be done by name only?

Partly, and the part is measurable. A name maps to a nakshatra through its traditional pada syllable, and nakshatra determines four of the eight kootas — Tara, Yoni, Gana and Nadi, worth 21 of 36 points. The other four kootas are computed from the Moon sign, which a name does not contain, so 15 points stay out of reach no matter how the name is analysed.

Is name matching as accurate as date-of-birth matching?

They are not more or less accurate — they reach opposite halves of the same 36 points. A name gives you the 21 nakshatra-derived points; a date of birth gives you the 15 sign-derived points. Neither reaches the other half, and only a full birth date, time and place reaches all 36 plus Manglik.

What if my name was not chosen from my birth star?

Then a name-based match is computing someone else's nakshatra. This is the largest error source in name matching and it is undetectable from the name alone. If you know your birth nakshatra from a family horoscope, use that instead of the syllable — and if you know your birth date, the date-based route is on firmer ground.

Why do some tools give a percentage for name matching?

Usually by scoring the 21 reachable points and presenting them as if they were out of 36, or by folding in name numerology and reporting the blend as a single figure. Both make a partial reading look complete. We show the subtotal against the 21 it can actually reach, and say plainly which 15 are missing.

Which nakshatra does my name belong to?

Find the syllable your name begins with in the 27-row table above; the row is your candidate nakshatra. If your syllable is one of the 12 listed in the ambiguity census, you have two candidates and the name cannot separate them — you would need the birth date to decide.

What this page can NOT tell you

• A name-only match cannot compute Varna, Vashya, Graha Maitri or Bhakoot — 15 of the 36 points. These need a Moon sign, and no name contains one.
• It cannot assess Manglik status at all. Manglik requires Mars and the Lagna, and the Lagna needs a birth time accurate to minutes.
• It assumes both names were given on the birth nakshatra syllable. If either was not — which is common — the computed nakshatra belongs to someone else, and nothing in the name reveals that.
• For 12 of the 95 distinct syllables the nakshatra is genuinely ambiguous between two options, which can swing the Nadi and Gana result by up to 14 points.
• No koota score, complete or partial, predicts whether a marriage will last. Ashtakoot is a 36-point screening heuristic recorded in classical texts, not an outcome model, and it was never validated against divorce data.

The 21/15 split, the sign-independence check across all 144 sign combinations, and the 95-syllable / 12-collision census on this page were produced by running the engine and its lookup tables directly, not transcribed from a source. Any reader with the koota tables can reproduce the worked example line by line.

How AskSoma computes and what we refuse to claim · Engine: Swiss Ephemeris via @asksoma/compatibility-core (calculateGunaMilan), nakshatra syllable map from the classical 108-pada namakshar table · Ayanamsa: Lahiri (Chitrapaksha) · Content reviewed 2026-08-07