Fantasy name generator
Names for people in an invented world, from lists we wrote and read through name by name. Pick a feel and generate as many as you need.
Free, with no sign-up. Every name is yours to use in anything you write, with no credit owed.
Names
Press a name to copy it.
Choosing a name
- Give each culture its own sounds. Readers learn a people by its names. Keep one set of sounds per culture, soft and vowel-led for one and hard and clipped for another, and a stranger’s name will say where they are from.
- Make it easy to say once. A reader who cannot pronounce a name skips it, and a skipped name is forgotten. Prefer names a reader can say the first time, and keep apostrophes for a reason.
- Keep the main cast distinct. Invented names look alike faster than real ones. Check that no two important characters share a first letter or an ending.
How these names are made
Each feel has its own fixed list of invented names, which we wrote and read through in full, keeping clear of names from the best-known fantasy books and games and of words that are rude in English, Spanish, French or German. Each press of Generate shows the next twelve, so no name comes back until you have seen the whole list.
Nothing you generate is sent anywhere or saved: the names are picked in your browser.
In Author Sweets
Every character and place in an Author Sweets book has its own page in Planning, with the facts you keep about them and, under Also known as, the nicknames and titles the text uses, so Appears in finds every scene they are in whichever name is on the page.
Stuck on the scene rather than the name? Try one of the writing prompts, or browse the other name generators.