About

Why Breaking Names?

Because the best show of the century taught a generation to see the periodic table hiding inside ordinary words.

In late September 2026, a New York Times poll of more than 500 actors, showrunners and other TV insiders named Breaking Bad the best television series of the 21st century, ahead of The Wire, Mad Men, Succession and Fleabag. Two weeks later the show, Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul are still trending on Google in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia.

The show's opening titles are famous for a small trick: the elements Br (bromine, 35) and Ba (barium, 56) appear out of green smoke and the title spells itself around them. The opening credits then highlight one element symbol inside each cast and crew name. Breaking Names lets everyone else join the credits — and then asks a harder question: can your whole name be spelled with elements?

What you can do here

• Name Lab — credits-style highlights, a full element spelling, your name's molar mass and an element personality (11 possible results), with a downloadable card.
• Credits Maker — an animated opening sequence starring up to eight friends, shareable as a link or a poster.
• Lab Games — Split Second, Symbol Sprint (three difficulties) and Spellable or Not?
• Periodic Table — all 118 elements with name origins and discovery dates.

How the speller works

There are 118 element symbols: 14 with one letter (H, B, C, N, O, F, P, S, K, V, Y, I, W, U) and 104 with two. To spell a word the Lab works from the end of the word backwards, recording for every position whether the rest of the word can still be completed with one- or two-letter symbols. That makes it instant to say whether a name is fully elemental, and to list every possible spelling (fewest tiles first) without trying dead ends.

If a name can't be completed, a second pass finds the spelling that leaves the fewest letters stranded, which are shown as dashed red tiles. Accents are removed first, so "Zoë" is treated as "Zoe".

The "molar mass" of your name simply adds up the standard atomic weights of your tiles (for radioactive elements without a standard weight, the mass number of a long-lived isotope). The compound "formula" is written in Hill order (carbon, then hydrogen, then alphabetical) and is entirely imaginary — please don't try to make it.

Fun facts used on the site

• J and Q are the only letters of the alphabet that don't appear in any element symbol.
• "Nonrepresentationalisms" is one of the longest English words that can be spelled entirely in element symbols: N·O·N·Re·P·Re·Se·N·Ta·Ti·O·Na·Li·Sm·S.
• In the show's original season 1–4 titles, both Br and Ba were shown with the same electron shell configuration (2-8-18-7, bromine's); this was later corrected.
• Mercury and bromine are the only elements that are liquid at room temperature.

Sources

• NYT best-TV-of-the-century poll coverage: Dark Horizons, Selectra
• Opening titles and credits trivia: IMDb — Breaking Bad goofs & trivia
• Spelling with element symbols: Nature blogs — Alphabet of elements, Amin Mesbah — Elemental speller, Programming Praxis — Element words
• Element data (atomic weights, names, discovery dates, etymology): IUPAC periodic table and Wikipedia — List of chemical element name etymologies
• Trend data: Google Trends

Credits & small print

Fonts: Archivo Black, Space Grotesk and JetBrains Mono via Google Fonts. Everything else — code, words, personalities and graphics — was made for this site.

Breaking Names is an unofficial fan tribute and a chemistry toy. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by AMC, Sony Pictures Television or anyone involved with Breaking Bad. Element personalities are for fun, not science.

Privacy: there are no trackers, accounts or servers here. Recent names and best scores are stored only in your own browser's local storage.

Made for dailyma.de on 13 October 2026.