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A question for the writers/would-be writers/wanna-be writers/could-be writers and should-be writers among us.

How do you name characters?

Basically I see two classes of names, meaningful and arbitrary.

Meaningful ones is where the character's name right away tells you something about the person. The hero has a cool name, the villain an evil one, the comic relief a funny one, the serious protagonist a symbolic one etc. Stephan Strange, Willy Loman, 'Little' John are all examples. You see this mainly in pop culture (Willy Loman - Low Man - is a rare high culture example) and they'll often sound made up.

Arbitrary names are just that, picked out of a book or out of the air and do not reveal anything about the character (except maybe gender and ethnicity). James Bond, for example, was named for a name Ian Flaming saw on a book which he thought was the dullest plainest name he could think of. These days of course it's taken on a meaning of its own.

So my question is when do you choose one naming route, when do you choose the other?

And when you're doing arbitrary names, how do you pick them?

A few further thoughts

1) Totally random - these names are totally randomly made up by the author without any reference or backing to them. They are often find on their own, but can seem odd if the story has a strong setting within a world or lore and the names clearly stand out against each other.

2) If the story is based on a setting - eg a historical period - then the names can be chosen from a pool of references from that era and region of the world. Even sci-fi and fantasy use this as many stories often have a rough grounding in periods and connections to earth based periods.

3) Internal to the story. Kind of like 2 but where the author has created their own world and setting which hasn't got a real world basis to draw from. In this the names would be tied to the world the writer has created (or is working in); thus the names would fit the setting.



In general names can be a tricky area for many people, especially when the actual name might not matter (ergo its not connected to properties about the character); or where if it matters its an internal reference (eg all Starks are important in Game of Thrones but they could just as easily be called Quarks or Philips or any other name as the story makes the name important).

https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/name/#type=common;common=Human%20Male

obviously.

Stark is a good example I think of meaningful name, Stark to me implies cold, plain, unadorned. Tells you something about the clan. Seems a deliberate choice unlike say Lanester (unless there's a meaning these I don't know).

One thing that occured to me is while in film or plays or comics you see the character, but in print you don't. Does that make it more important to give a character a meaningful name?

"John McClain enters" in a film script tells you a lot because you see Bruce Willis. But in prose you'd have to then spend a paragraph or more describing what he looks like, what he's wearing etc. While if you name him Butch Toughguy that already does some of the work for you.

I think its more that the name does have some quality that stands out; but in the end its the story that makes the character. It also really depends what you are writing.

A heroic DnD adventure style story might well have very heroic names; whilst murder mystery set in modern times might not have any stand-out names.

I cheat. I am running a dungeons and dragons campaign set in a celtic style setting. So I name my characters in Irish Gaelic, and just use a descriptive term for them.
So, the players meet an old druid?
Druids are magic, Irish Gaelic for magic is Draiocht, boom, there's his name.
They meet someone who wields two swords? Cliodh means sword, done.
Meet someone who is really angry? Fearg is angry, done.

This only works because none of my players can speak Gaelic. Otherwise it would seem really silly. I actually read a campaign setting once where someone had obviously done this for all the place names and so on, and it was hilarious to read.

If it's a name of a human character on Earth, I pick a last name that fits my fancy, then a first name that sounds right. Example? Starfleet Captain Evan Wolfe of the U.S.S. Antietam NCC-1721B.


Fantasy/sci fi names? Figure out what all names of that type have in common. My High Elf noble that I use the most is named Indirath.

 Da Boss wrote:
I cheat. I am running a dungeons and dragons campaign set in a celtic style setting. So I name my characters in Irish Gaelic, and just use a descriptive term for them.
So, the players meet an old druid?
Druids are magic, Irish Gaelic for magic is Draiocht, boom, there's his name.
They meet someone who wields two swords? Cliodh means sword, done.
Meet someone who is really angry? Fearg is angry, done.

This only works because none of my players can speak Gaelic. Otherwise it would seem really silly. I actually read a campaign setting once where someone had obviously done this for all the place names and so on, and it was hilarious to read.

Yeah, otherwise you get Hands of Iron and Angr... Oh, wait.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
I cheat. I am running a dungeons and dragons campaign set in a celtic style setting. So I name my characters in Irish Gaelic, and just use a descriptive term for them.
So, the players meet an old druid?
Druids are magic, Irish Gaelic for magic is Draiocht, boom, there's his name.
They meet someone who wields two swords? Cliodh means sword, done.
Meet someone who is really angry? Fearg is angry, done.

This only works because none of my players can speak Gaelic. Otherwise it would seem really silly. I actually read a campaign setting once where someone had obviously done this for all the place names and so on, and it was hilarious to read.

Yeah, otherwise you get Hands of Iron and Angr... Oh, wait.

GW are just masters at this, giving people and places names that sound familiar but exotic and resisting the urge to just smash random typewriter buttons and call it a day.

My thoughts;

Getting hung up on names I think is a common trap for writers. Fundamentally, a name isn't actually that important. You can change it in seconds with control+f. Meaningful names I think are also kind of a trap. Especially if you try and imbue meaning before you even know who the character is.

Ultimately what's important is personality and giving the character depth, motivation, and imo strong dialogue that informs people about who the character is. Word choice is important. How people talk says a lot about how they want others to perceive them. All of those things are a lot harder to nail down and change than a name once you get started.

So I don't even bother. Have my male characters start out as Jason and the girls start out as Anne (or other generic names pulled at random) and I just change the names later. Eventually a good one comes up.

Names are one of the easiest things to copy edit in a word processor so my advice is don't worry about it. Usually a good name just comes up later naturally with no need to sit and stare at your screen wasting time trying to be more clever than the time is really worth.

EDIT: That said, for the love of god if what you're doing ever starts looking like the Space Wolves Codex just stop XD

On a more on-topic note, if you're making up your own cultures or names, be aware of what language you're writing the story in. Having the male names end in -a or -ella (or variations thereof) or other suffixes that are feminine in English (or whatever language you're writing in) can work if you're conciously trying to create a dichotomy between your setting and the real world language you're using, but done randomly it risks coming across as a name that sticks out like a sore thumb without the audience necessarily figuring out why.

Bonus points if you name the sweet little girl "Francisco" or something obviously masculine, play it off as a quirk or joke and then reveal that she's really Lord Francisco the Horrible Murdermutilator though, refuge in audacity is great when it works.

I name characters based on the setting. Normally. In most cases if I am writing something, I will stick with the setting. So if I have an original fantasy world that uses its own names, as opposed to a historical setting, I will try to stick to that. Mostly so I don't have a bunch of original names crowded around the hero, Jeff.

But on the flipside to that, my last D&D character was a gnome named Willy Winchester and before that it was a gnome named Falcon Dynamo. So really I am all over the place.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
I cheat. I am running a dungeons and dragons campaign set in a celtic style setting. So I name my characters in Irish Gaelic, and just use a descriptive term for them.
So, the players meet an old druid?
Druids are magic, Irish Gaelic for magic is Draiocht, boom, there's his name.
They meet someone who wields two swords? Cliodh means sword, done.
Meet someone who is really angry? Fearg is angry, done.

This only works because none of my players can speak Gaelic. Otherwise it would seem really silly. I actually read a campaign setting once where someone had obviously done this for all the place names and so on, and it was hilarious to read.

Yeah, otherwise you get Hands of Iron and Angr... Oh, wait.

Ferrus Manus is obviously a title name given after he defeated the dragon and had his hands coated in metal. Naming the legion after his most obvious feature was to denote that they would be a symbol of strength and an extension of him.

Angron is his gladiator slave name, not the name his parents' gave him and that he actually used among his people.


Imperial history doesn't record their true names because who they were was never as important as what they were. I'm just making this up but I think it's a pretty good save of two goofy names.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Stark is a good example I think of meaningful name, Stark to me implies cold, plain, unadorned. Tells you something about the clan. Seems a deliberate choice unlike say Lanester (unless there's a meaning these I don't know).

AsoIaF is loosely based on the War of the Roses: The House of York fighting the House of Lancaster. York became Stark and the White Rose a White Wolf; Lancaster became Lannister, and the Red Rose a Red Lion.

The name Stark ended up fitting well to the traits of House Stark, but as far as the actual naming goes it was actually pretty lazy writing

 LordofHats wrote:
My thoughts;

Getting hung up on names I think is a common trap for writers. Fundamentally, a name isn't actually that important. You can change it in seconds with control+f. Meaningful names I think are also kind of a trap. Especially if you try and imbue meaning before you even know who the character is.

Ultimately what's important is personality and giving the character depth, motivation, and imo strong dialogue that informs people about who the character is. Word choice is important. How people talk says a lot about how they want others to perceive them. All of those things are a lot harder to nail down and change than a name once you get started.

So I don't even bother. Have my male characters start out as Jason and the girls start out as Anne (or other generic names pulled at random) and I just change the names later. Eventually a good one comes up.

Names are one of the easiest things to copy edit in a word processor so my advice is don't worry about it. Usually a good name just comes up later naturally with no need to sit and stare at your screen wasting time trying to be more clever than the time is really worth.

EDIT: That said, for the love of god if what you're doing ever starts looking like the Space Wolves Codex just stop XD

This is good advice. The only way to get something written, is it to keep writing. Don't let the flow be broken by trivial details like a name. That can be fixed in re-writes.

I tend to look at the character background first - so when writing my Warhammer Fantasy fiction so I will look at mostly Germanic (or nearby) names for the Empire and choose one I like. Different regions - different names.

I tend not to choose too unusual ones or ones that might sound "silly"

There are a good variety of webpages as resources - so I will go for German first and last names etc.

So in my "A Bloody Road" I have Sabina Hafna as my main character.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
On a more on-topic note, if you're making up your own cultures or names, be aware of what language you're writing the story in. Having the male names end in -a or -ella (or variations thereof) or other suffixes that are feminine in English (or whatever language you're writing in) can work if you're conciously trying to create a dichotomy between your setting and the real world language you're using, but done randomly it risks coming across as a name that sticks out like a sore thumb without the audience necessarily figuring out why.

Bonus points if you name the sweet little girl "Francisco" or something obviously masculine, play it off as a quirk or joke and then reveal that she's really Lord Francisco the Horrible Murdermutilator though, refuge in audacity is great when it works.

Something I find helpful is to actually learn some basic linguistics. You don't have to go full Tolkien and create a bunch of functional but fake languages, but learning how sounds relate to the conception of a word helps me a lot when working with fantasy names. It'll also help you build a map for what names for related fictional characters could sound like.

There's lots of useful online guides on Conlangs on the internet, and even an entire Wiki dedicated to people who enjoy doing it. Again you don't have to go all out and actually make a language, but I found creating a Phonology chart and building some rudimentary grammar rules helped me a lot more than just making things up on the fly.

Though with my style it's not something I do first. It comes near the end of a project which in my experience means I've only done it twice.

Although "James Bond" was cribbed from an innocent ornithologist, would a spy called Sherman Finkelstein have become quite so iconic?

Even if a name is not an allusion in itself, surely is must "fit" in context.

Allusory names are pretty tricky, even for authors with a reputation for genius. In the Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann named the elusive love interest Clavdia Chauchat. Her family name is "hot cat" in French ... lolwut. He had better luck with her given name, which evokes exoticism by replacing the expected U with a distracting, questionable V. It's too bizarre to be an alternate spelling and therefore must be an unconnected word, a name from some unknown place. It also evokes Latinistic inscriptions where Vs replace Us, connoting a sense of archaic formaility - and thus distance. But "hot cat"? Gimme a break.

A mix is totally fine. I agree Gaelic is an absolutely fantastic message to steal from- especially if you just take it a step further, and obscure it by spelling it how you think it ought to be pronounced. It is almost always wrong, and unique.

I used to use Seventh sanctum, but it appears to be down, hopefully not forever. They had silly, evil sounding, and my personal favorite epic fantasy name generators, like Storm Bloodsword, Darrak Deathsworn, and Elderberry Faunakatana. Although unusable in serious literature, they make wonderful character seeds, as they essentially write themselves.

Several famous authors end up using volunteers from their fanbase for background folks and jobbers. Old phone books and census data are great for fillers.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
A question for the writers/would-be writers/wanna-be writers/could-be writers and should-be writers among us.

How do you name characters?

Basically I see two classes of names, meaningful and arbitrary.

Meaningful ones is where the character's name right away tells you something about the person. The hero has a cool name, the villain an evil one, the comic relief a funny one, the serious protagonist a symbolic one etc. Stephan Strange, Willy Loman, 'Little' John are all examples. You see this mainly in pop culture (Willy Loman - Low Man - is a rare high culture example) and they'll often sound made up.

Arbitrary names are just that, picked out of a book or out of the air and do not reveal anything about the character (except maybe gender and ethnicity). James Bond, for example, was named for a name Ian Flaming saw on a book which he thought was the dullest plainest name he could think of. These days of course it's taken on a meaning of its own.

So my question is when do you choose one naming route, when do you choose the other?

And when you're doing arbitrary names, how do you pick them?

The only time I find meaningful names to work are when they are chosen in-story or when the story is meant to be at least vaguely unreal.

Usually I prefer to amass a huge quantity of arbitrary names and then assign them to the characters who "fit" them. For example, Shafter Wasco is a name I picked up from a freeway connection, but it sounds like the best name for a space sheriff I was tooling around with. (Don't you dare steal it!). For rich, snobby siblings, I went with Royal and Regal Sloan, named after urinals.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Basically I see two classes of names, meaningful and arbitrary.

Meaningful ones is where the character's name right away tells you something about the person. The hero has a cool name, the villain an evil one, the comic relief a funny one, the serious protagonist a symbolic one etc. Stephan Strange, Willy Loman, 'Little' John are all examples. You see this mainly in pop culture (Willy Loman - Low Man - is a rare high culture example) and they'll often sound made up.

Arbitrary names are just that, picked out of a book or out of the air and do not reveal anything about the character (except maybe gender and ethnicity). James Bond, for example, was named for a name Ian Flaming saw on a book which he thought was the dullest plainest name he could think of. These days of course it's taken on a meaning of its own.

There's a lot more to names than this. For instance, Ishmael doesn't tell us anything about the character, but the name is an essential part of the character and the story from that first line, "Call me Ishmael". Imagine if he was given a different generic name, "Call me Thomas." It's a totally different feel.

 Da Boss wrote:
This only works because none of my players can speak Gaelic. Otherwise it would seem really silly. I actually read a campaign setting once where someone had obviously done this for all the place names and so on, and it was hilarious to read.

It's perfectly fine in your own campaign, as you say the players don't know the language.

It's often a lot less fine in books, movies, games etc that are actually distributed around the world. Find a small obscure (to you) language, that still somehow is easily found in writing and sound files (not at all suspicious) and use it as you see fit. No one will ever know, right? IIRC there was a movie with aliens that spoke Hungarian, and that was just lazy. It IS a relatively small language, but it's still a market of ~15 million people smack dab in the middle of Europe with neighbors who might also recognize the sound. The Star Wars martial art named Teräs Käsi (literally Steel Hand in Finnish) I can live with, it's just a name for something and doesn't reveal the plot. But when a writer like Timothy Zahn, who wrote many of the best Star Wars EU stories, jumped to Finnish for names in one of his own books it kind of irritated me - it was ofc already clear that the war was a misunderstanding and the obvious aggressors weren't the mysterious "Conquerors" but I still wish the friendly aliens with an agenda hadn't been named for their function in Finnish. Yeah, the guy named Conqueror just told the heroes that those guys over there are probably it...

As for random or meaningful, that depends on what my aim is. If we're playing some sort of modern or otherwise more realistic game I give characters somewhat random names. Fantasy characters really demand some show at times, and a particularly heroic hero (or villanous villain) is sure to be called something that shows what he's about. And if we play Star Wreck characters are often named something that resembles real scifi characters but in a somewhat silly way. ;-)

Honestly I don't think it's lazy to use real world languages. I've studied three hard languages so far and will be starting number four (Arabic) this summer so putting in the effort to both invent and then apply a wholely fictional elvish, Klingon or whatever language to me just seems a waste.

If some Hungarians or Gujratis or New Guinians understand your foreign dialogue, so be it. It'll probably make them smile.

As long as the pronounciation is correct I always enjoy seeing Irish words show up in fiction. Of course, the pronounciation is usually not correct, and then it's like nails on a chalkboard. I take your point though, but I think in a fantasy setting where you are using cultural analogues (which many do) it's alright. The big evil empire in my game is based on the Byzantines, so I'll be looting them for names for everyone.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Stark is a good example I think of meaningful name, Stark to me implies cold, plain, unadorned. Tells you something about the clan. Seems a deliberate choice unlike say Lanester (unless there's a meaning these I don't know).

Lannister -> Lancaster, Stark -> York. ASoIaF is the War of the Roses but with Dragons coming from the middle east.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

If some Hungarians or Gujratis or New Guinians understand your foreign dialogue, so be it. It'll probably make them smile.

IIRC, the guy who played Nein Numb in Return of the Jedi just spoke his native language in the film. Apparently pretty funny if you understand what he says.

Even in more serious works, there's an argument for "themed" names, even if they're a little more subtle - it all builds the themes of the work.

Speaking of not using real languages to reveal plot, The Thing has two Norwegian scientists yelling "shoot it! It's not a dog, it's an alien!" in Norwegian about 10 minutes into the film just before they themselves get shot. That kinda killed the suspense a bit.

 LordofHats wrote:

That said, for the love of god if what you're doing ever starts looking like the Space Wolves Codex just stop XD

That's some bloody top-quality advice right there...

Most of the names I use are inspired from coworkers / clients, but I have a large pool to choose from there.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Speaking of not using real languages to reveal plot, The Thing has two Norwegian scientists yelling "shoot it! It's not a dog, it's an alien!" in Norwegian about 10 minutes into the film just before they themselves get shot. That kinda killed the suspense a bit.

Well they would say that If they said something nonsensical then people would likely complain.

Plus that dog is dodgy from the start - fabulous film and equally good prequel. If only the directors of other sci-fi film prequals were as good.