Name Generators

[Melrick]

One critical part of writing an original story is the characters' names. Good, appropriate names are very important, perhaps more so than many people think. The direction more and more writers are going in is to choose increasingly strange and unusual names, feeling that makes their character/story stand out more. What it can do, though, is to put off the reader. It's been shown that if the lead character has a difficult to pronounce name then that usually immediately puts off the reader. Names don't have to be unusual. The main character in Stephen King's book "The Dead Zone" is named John Smith, for example.

The most important thing is that the names are appropriate to your story, such as the genre and even the region your story is set in. It might take a bit of research on your part, so here are some name generators to provide some help:

Fantasy Name Generator. You can create serious, fun and specialised.

Random Name Generator. Names generated using the US Census. It allows you to vary the complexity to very common to totally obscure, and by sex.

Seventh Sanctum. You can NOT go past this site for generators, of all kinds! The king of generators, as far as I'm concerned.

Totro. This fantasy name generator is a bit hit and miss, but you can specify how many syllables you want in the names.

Yafnag. Another hit-and-miss fantasy name generator which could be useful.

Prairie Den. A contemporary name generator. You can choose the sex, and it gives you one first name and one surname at a time.

Serendipity. A very good name generator site, providing contemporary and fantasy names, as well as a good selection of other generators.

Squid.org. Provides quite a good range of name generators, such as specific regions (Aztec, Japanese, Greek, etc) as well as fantasy names.

Suburban Name Generator. A name generator with a difference. Need a name for your newly created suburb? This could help.

Joburg Suburb Name Generator. Similar to the above generator.

Namator. A good contemporary name generator that allows you to specify not just the sex but the regions for the first and second names. For example, you could have Spanish first name and a Japanese second name.

Universal Name Generator. Quite a good generator that can certain regional specific names, in either male or female. Only displays one name at a time, though.

Baby Name Network. A baby naming site, enabling you to search by just the sex or by various regions. It also provides a short meaning of the name.

Please keep in mind that these links could change at any time, or the sites even to disappear. Hopefully you'll be able to find something to help you out, and maybe others could provide their own favourite name generator sites.

[cu-kid9]

Behind the Name: Random Name Generator Generates names from cultures all over the world. You can add your own surname, but it will generate first and up to three middle names for you.

[Melrick]

Pseudo-Elizabethan Place Name Generator

Regency Place Name Generator

Random Town Name Generator

[Melrick]

Chaotic Shiny. Another very good generator site in the vein of Seventh Sanctum, with quite a large variety of well created generators.

Medieval Name Generator. Specify male or female names. Perhaps more medieval sounding names, rather than historically accurate names. Some are good and some are silly, but you might find something there to suit you.

Town name generator. Another town name generator, giving you 5 random, fairly generic names per page; refresh for more names.

British town name generator. Gives you British-sounding town names. Many of them sound rather silly, to me, but some of them sound quite feasible.