Nafnaval
Every name in the Icelandic name register, broken into the parts it is built from.
The idea
Icelandic names are compounds. Þórbjörg is Þór plus björg. That structure is the interesting part, and nothing online let you follow a single element from one name to the next.
What I built
A static site covering the whole mannanafnaskrá: meaning, declension, categories, and how many people carry each name. Every element gets its own page, so you can start at a name and end up somewhere unexpected.
The interesting part
Meaning resolves through a strict precedence chain: hand-written cited entries first, then a lexicon of roughly 215 Old Norse elements sourced to public-domain dictionaries, and only then AI-drafted text, which stays quarantined behind an óstaðfest badge and is never merged into the cited data. The model fills gaps; it does not get to launder itself into a source.
Decisions
A strict order of trust
Meaning comes from hand-written cited entries first, then a lexicon sourced to Zoëga (1910) and Cleasby-Vigfusson (1874), then AI drafts marked óstaðfest, and finally ‘not recorded’. Lower levels never overwrite higher ones.
Tag the element, not the name
A category added to an element such as þór applies to every name that contains it, so one decision reaches hundreds of pages.
Builds never call the sources
Bearer counts alone take about 11,000 requests to Þjóðskrá, so data is fetched deliberately and committed. Separate source tests check that upstream APIs still return the shapes the scripts expect, and treat a 429 as inconclusive rather than a failure.