Salutation API: the right greeting for every name

One call: name in, greeting out

Most teams build salutations with a formula on top of a gender column, and every language ends up with its own special cases. The salutation endpoint does the parsing, the gender lookup and the language rules in one request, and returns three ready lines: formal, informal and neutral.

Titles in the name are kept where the language expects them, so “Dr. Anna Müller” becomes “Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Müller,” in German. A courtesy title in the input, such as Frau or Mr, decides the gender over the lookup, and so does a gender your CRM already stores.

Only have an email list? Send the address instead of a name: anna.mueller@example.de gives “Sehr geehrte Frau Mueller,”, and role addresses such as info@ get the form for organisations. Addresses carry no accents, so use a stored name when you have one.

curl -X POST https://namegender.com/api/v1/salutation \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "Dr. Anna Müller", "language": "de"}'

# "salutation": {
#   "formal":   "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Müller,",
#   "informal": "Liebe Anna,",
#   "neutral":  "Guten Tag Dr. Anna Müller,"
# }

Ten languages, each with its own rules

The hard part of a salutation is not the gender, it is everything around it. French formal letters use no surname at all. Spanish takes the first of two surnames and Portuguese the last. Dutch capitalises the surname particle once the first name is dropped. Turkish puts Bey or Hanım after the given name, and Polish needs no name at all in a formal opening.

Neutral when the gender is not certain

A wrong gender in a salutation is worse than no gender at all. The gendered form is used only when the gender is known with at least 90% probability, a threshold you can change, and when the language has the name part it needs: “Sehr geehrter Herr Max” is wrong, so a German salutation without a surname falls back to “Guten Tag Max,”.

Every response says which form was used and why: gender unknown, below your threshold, no surname, or a neutral form requested. Companies and shared mailboxes get the language’s form for organisations, such as “Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,” or “Sayın Yetkili,”.

In spreadsheets, Zapier, Make and n8n

In Google Sheets, =NAMEGENDER_SALUTATION(A2:A500, "de") fills a whole column, and results are cached so reopening the sheet does not spend credits again. Zapier has a Get Salutation action, Make a Get a Salutation module and n8n a Salutation operation, so a new CRM contact can get its greeting the moment it is created.

The client libraries for Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Go, Java, .NET, R, PowerShell and Rust all have a salutation method and a bulk version for up to 100 names per request.

Questions

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