Indian Baby Names Starting with A

About this collection

More Indian names begin with A than with any other letter, and this catalog is no exception: over a quarter of its names are here. Part of the reason is the Devanagari script, where both the short vowel अ and the long vowel आ are written with an English A. Arjun, Anand and Aditi start with the short vowel; Aarav, Aadhya and Aaradhya start with the long one, and the doubled Aa spelling has become the usual way to show it.

The letter covers every style. Classical names include Arjun, Aditya, Ashok, Ashwin, Aditi, Aruna and Akshara. Modern favourites include Aarav, Aarush, Ayaan, Advik, Aanya, Aarohi and Avni. Arabic-origin names such as Ahmed, Ali, Aisha and Aman sit alongside Punjabi Arshdeep and Tamil Aadhavan. Several popular spellings, among them Aahana, Aarna, Aarvi and Anaya, have no settled dictionary meaning, and their guides say so.

In the traditional rashi tables, names that begin with the vowels अ and आ belong to Mesh, the sign that corresponds to Aries. A name such as Aishwarya, which begins with ऐ, is assigned to Vrishabh instead. Our rashi guide explains how that syllable-based reading works and why it is a naming custom rather than a birth-chart calculation.