A name game, honestly labelled
Let us be completely straight before anything else: this calculator is entertainment, not a compatibility test in any scientific sense. It knows nothing about either of you, your history, your kindness, your humour or whether you would actually enjoy a rainy Sunday together. What it does is smaller and, we think, more charming for being honest about it: it turns the letters of two names into one playful percentage, using a fixed recipe that is printed in full on this page. The same two names always produce the same score, so you can check our working, reproduce it by hand, and argue about the result with full knowledge of exactly how little it means.
Games like this are older than the internet. Versions were worked out on school notebooks with letter counts and crossed-out characters long before browsers existed, and the pleasure was never the verdict itself: it was the excuse to say two names out loud together and see what number came back. This version keeps that spirit. Type the names, enjoy the percentage, share it if it made you smile, and let real compatibility be judged by the only instruments that have ever worked: time, conversation and how someone treats you when the car breaks down.
Exactly how the score is generated
Step by step, with nothing hidden: the two names are joined, lowercased, and stripped of everything that is not a letter from a to z. Each remaining letter contributes its character code multiplied by its position in the string, first letter times 1, second times 2, and so on. Those products are added into one total. The total is divided by 59 and the remainder kept, which lands between 0 and 58, and 41 is added, which is why every score on this page falls between 41% and 99%: the recipe is built so nobody ever gets a zero and nobody gets a suspiciously perfect hundred. That is the entire method. No database, no astrology, no psychology, and no randomness: press Calculate a hundred times and the answer cannot change.
Reading your verdict
The verdicts are deliberately gentle. Ninety and above is "Written in the stars", 75 to 89 is "A strong match", 60 to 74 is "Plenty of spark", 45 to 59 earns a "Worth a coffee", and the lowest band, 41 to 44, gets the hopeful "Opposites attract?" instead of anything unkind, because a toy that insults people about their relationships would not be much of a toy. Wherever your pair lands, the band table below shows the full scale with your result marked, so you can see how close the letters came to talking you up or down a level.
Worked example
Romeo + Juliet. Joined and cleaned, the names become “romeojuliet”, eleven letters. Their weighted total is 114×1 + 111×2 + 109×3 + 101×4 + 111×5 + 106×6 + 117×7 + 108×8 + 105×9 + 101×10 + 116×11 = 7,172. Then 7,172 mod 59 = 33, and 41 + 33 = 74% — “Plenty of spark”. The most famous couple in literature, rated by their letters alone.
How to use this calculator
- Type your name in the first box.
- Type their name in the second box.
- Read your percentage and verdict in the headline panel.
- Check the gauge and the band table below to see where your score sits on the full scale.
- Try the names in the other order, or with a nickname, and watch the letters change the answer.
What real compatibility is actually made of
Since this page has cheerfully admitted it cannot measure compatibility, it is only fair to point at the things that can. Decades of relationship research keep circling the same unglamorous list: whether you can raise a difficult subject without the conversation becoming a contest, whether small kindnesses and bids for attention get answered rather than ignored, whether money, family and the future are pulling in roughly the same direction, and whether each person repairs things after an argument instead of keeping score. None of that fits in a percentage, and all of it is observable within a few months of paying attention.
So use the number the way it deserves to be used: as a conversation starter, a screenshot to send with a joke attached, or the tiebreaker for whose turn it is to pick the film. If the score is high, enjoy the letters' blessing. If it is low, remember that the formula has never met either of you, has confused couples with identical letters before, and would rate some of history's happiest pairs as opposites attracting. The names are the game. The people are the story.