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Names

Crazy Linoone

broke ASB
How do you people come up with names for your characters?

For fantasy characters or characters that do not require real names, I usually just slam the keyboard until some interesting bunch of characters come up. When I need real, existing names though, I have a hard time coming up with anything (It's the reason, if anyone's paying attention, that all my human characters in the RP forums have the same name even though they have different personalities and aren't the same person). I think I mostly get stuck on the fact that I want names to be at least slightly symbolic instead of completely unrelated, but has to feel like it fits the character at the same time. For NaNoWriMo, I just randomly inputted names as a placeholder and will go change them later, once I found more suitable ones.

I tried randomly generating names via name generators, but I don't have enough patience to slosh through lists of names :P

You don't have to post advice, per say, but I'm mostly interested in how you guys come up with names.
 
Usually, the name just pops in my head out of nowhere and I don't really have to do any thinking. I have this weird ability to make up words pretty much without thinking. I'll show you:

Saskin Nemfields. Nuora Divisia. Levestas Poro.

Just made all of those up right now.

I usually don't like to make my names meaningful or related to the character because in real life, most of us have completely undescriptive names anyways. Not like our parents knew what we'd be. Occasionally, it'll be meaningful, but yeah. I just like random ones. Sometimes if I'm running low on ideas though or if I want it to be a really good name, I'll mash together words until it looks into something pretty. (My own username is an example of that.)
 
It depends; for a lot of my stories the characters are based off my friends irl, so their first names are their actual names, and generally their last names have something to do with their part in the story. (except for a character in Watercolor (which I really need to continue writing) who's a huge Doctor Who fan and her meaningful last name sounded scarily similar to Tennant so I just changed it to that)

If not, though, they'd come from either a name generator or one of my Pokemon characters.
 
I usually pick out things I want to name my children or I look in my handy dandy Baby Names book. Or I'll name them after book characters in the latest book I've been reading. Or video games characters, television show charries, etc.
 
From everywhere.

I make up random stuff, I use generators, I scour baby name sites/Behind the Name (though that's primarily because I find name etymology/meaning interesting and fun and not because I actually care whether other people "get it", nor do I make it a point to belabor the meaning of a character's name because it's ~symbolic~ etc.; I'm not that pretentious), I abuse mythology, I abuse literature, I abuse video games, I make note of interesting names I hear while listening to conversations on the train or in the store. Sometimes I pick names based on quick word association that may or may not go off into strange places (re: why many of my machop-line pokémon ingame are named "Christian" or similar). Sometimes my characters' names are mostly-random words that are not names at all and probably never should be but I use them anyway—I am dying to find a character to name "Charlatan Break", for example, and please don't ask me why because I don't knooooow. It's just so pretty. ;-;

Right now, for example, I am sprucing up a plot bunny that involves... psychopomps or angels of death, for lack of a better term. In between flails to finish my final projects I've been hitting Wikipedia hard, snagging death-deity-related names for the characters and then bastardizing tweaking them so that they're a bit snappier, easier to pronounce, whatever. Some I just stole directly (Kisin, Neith, Ammit, Samael); some I shortened or twisted around (Muut>Mutt, Ixtab>Ixie, Baron Samedi>Sam Saturday); some I anagrammized or did other strange things to (Malach HaMavet>Heath Malcamav). For more fantasy-related things, on the other hand, I usually make things up or hit Seventh Sanctum. When I make up characters for my fakemon stuff, I usually try to go to BtN and find names that match the type or whatever else I'm doing with the bad name puns (and so at least avoid "Brawly", etc.). Characters whose names I am not etymologically invested in usually come from either my list of "this sounded interesting when I first heard it" or a few button-mashes of the Seventh Sanctum US census data quicknamer. And so on.

Something interesting I've noticed about my own stuff is that I... have a tendency to not like it when character names don't "match", either given name+surname or within related groups. Sometimes I'll get lucky and hit on names that just sound okay without me having to obsess over anything, but other times, especially when I'm going through BtN or whatever looking for names that ~mean something~, I'll find a cool name but then am unable to accept a surname or whatever that doesn't match its language of origin or what have you. My electric-specialist champion, for example, has been named "Voltaire" for a while. When I decided I wanted the league people to have surnames, too, I absolutely couldn't stand anything that wasn't French for him, no matter how nice it might otherwise have sounded. It got to the point where I spent a solid hour or so looking up scientists on Wikipedia, trying to find one that both had something to do with electricity and was French. Then, for no apparent reason, the rest of his immediate family all also ended up with painfully French names. (Including Jacques, which gets bonus points for accidentally also being another bad electricity pun—say it out loud, then go ahead and groan. I'll wait.) And they are not French and there is no logical reason for all of them to have French names. Now my sense of logic is twitching in the corner for the sake of my sense of aesthetics.

And, of course, there's the curious case of a certain probably-abandoned one-shot idea, which has nothing to do with anything Spanish or Hispanic or remotely-real-world-location/culture of any sort and yet somehow magically managed to fill itself up with a cast of Spaniards in a Spanish castle when I wasn't looking. I am still very confused as to how this happened. (And I am probably the only person who manages to get so worked up about this, ugh.)

also protip: if you make up a gibberish/conlang name, or even if you get one from a generator, please please please google it before you get really attached to it. It might already mean something else that other people might even actually have heard of; that something else could be benign but not something you want associated with your thingy, or it could be... not benign at all. I've already had a region share a name with a cricket equipment company, a character whose name was moderately-offensive British English slang, and another one whose name was apparently a threesome sex position. >>; The cricket company one I decided don't care so much about, but the other two changed really really fast. I'm pretty careful about that now, needless to say.

tl;dr awesome names can come from anywhere, for some value of "awesome" that meshes well with whatever the current project is. Or maybe even if it doesn't mesh well but just sounds amazing anyway (Charlataaaaan...)! Even if you have a "pet method" for picking names, you should get into the habit of jotting interesting ones down in a document somewhere, and always keep an eye/ear out for new ideas you might stumble across!

...!



...can you tell I'm tired and hyper and desperate for simple distractions yet, because I can tell
 
Lots of different ways.

Sometimes I just kind of... already have a name in mind as soon as I come up with the character, without even any thought involved. El Garbanzo from Okédoké has always been El Garbanzo from the second I drew him the first time, even years before I started on Okédoké (though his full name, which is basically just a long string of Hispanic-sounding nonsense just like his dad's name, didn't come around until later.)

Sometimes they're based on real people, so their names end up being derived from the real person's name in some way. Eddie Ril, Bridget Sticke, Adam Nebozu, and Damuru-J from Fnrrf Ygm Schnish: Alleghany Hell School are all this way; Eddie's based on me (with a different last name), and Bridget, Adam, and Damuru-J are all based on people I knew in high school. Bridget's last name got corrupted from "Stec" to "Sticke" (which is also kind of a punny name since she's very, very tall and very, very thin), and Adam's last name went from "Neighbors" to "Nebozu." Damuru-J's name is a weirder one, since I honestly can't remember where "Damuru" came from... though the "J" part was the real person's first initial.

There was one time where I actually got an idea for someone's last name from a dream. I had a character named Kat in several of my older games and such (she hasn't made any appearances recently, though) and for the longest time she didn't have a last name... until one night I randomly had a dream where I was talking to some old Merlin-looking guy in a hospital and he kept telling me that her last name was "Yuzan." It stuck, and she's been "Kat Yuzan" ever since.

And sometimes I just can't think of a name and end up naming people random silly stuff so they can have a name at all. Like Schnee McBoobs in Okédoké, whose name is a silly sound effect ("Schneeeeee!" originally being used as "the sound a Yoshi makes when kicked across a room" in an old crappy sprite comic I made a long time ago) and a reference to one of her more noticeable physical features.

In general, names are really hard for me to come up with, though (at least when the character isn't based on someone or something else that you can warp around a little to make a new name.) Schnee actually didn't have a first name until right before the scene where she first tells the other characters her name, so there was actually a point in Okédoké where she had appeared onscreen twice but didn't have a name yet.
 
(though his full name, which is basically just a long string of Hispanic-sounding nonsense just like his dad's name
... This makes me sad.


Usually I end up having a word in mind and corrupting it for a while until I have something enunciable and short and usually an actual name, and sometimes I look through behindthename until I find something. More frequently I ask people to name my characters and go with 'Rin' or 'Lyn' or 'Anna' or 'Maria' when they can't think of anything. ... Pretty much in that order. I think I've also used variations of Kat a few times.

I really want to go with words-as-names for one of my fantasy settings, but unfortunately I only have one high fantasy world and I'm trying for vaguely North and Central American and that's not a combination of tropes I want to do. If I ever go for a setting that's neither (sub)urban fantasy nor that one particular high fantasy setting, I'm totally doing that, though. It's a tad awkward in English? But I'd probably have them go by shortened forms most of the time.
 
I grab a convenient list and run some sort of markov chaining algorithm on it, adjusting parameters until I get something interesting-looking.
 
I go for meaningful names, unless the characters have English names (hello there, Aaron, Christine, Madeline, Samson, and Hannah). Though, I do have a fondness for color names (see: all Infinity character names other than Aaron and Kiseki (they all come from Latin) and all Waiting in Earth names other than Hannah (various languages, but protagonists' come from Old English, Japanese, and Spanish)).

But I rarely come up with names on my own.
 
I... spam baby name sites and then find a nice-seeming name with an appropriate meaning.

Or I just jam a ton of keys together, add vowels, pronounce it a few times and slap it in. That doesn't always work, but I accept it as placeholder names as well. And sometimes I just make them up in my head - examples being Karae and Hiari.
 
It varies. Sometimes I just use names I like, other times I actually put thought it into them. For example, Ciara Maher, Derek Miller and Mohmed Ramdani are just names I like whereas Hanig, Kunake and Cleeg have a meaning (from the Irish translation of "Veni, vidi, vici", "Tháinig mé, chonaic mé, claíogh mé").
 
FnrrfYgmSchnish said:
(though his full name, which is basically just a long string of Hispanic-sounding nonsense just like his dad's name

... This makes me sad.

The way I described it there makes it sound a lot worse than it actually is. I guess I didn't think people would actually take that (very, very exaggerated) description 100% seriously...

El Garbanzo's full name is Armando Francisco Jalapeño del Garbanzo, and his dad's is Alejandro San Pedro del Garbanzo. Basically they're just fairly normal (maybe a bit long, but fairly normal) Hispanic-sounding names with a few food references slipped in.

Other than their last names being "del Garbanzo," and one of El Garbanzo's middle names being "Jalapeño," nothing in there is really out of the ordinary. And plenty of fictional characters have food names (see half the cast of Dragonball Z), so even those aren't that bad.

====

EDIT: Also, more on names. Someone linked to behindthename.com, which reminded me that I've occasionally used one of those "big database of names" websites when I really had no idea what to name somebody and nothing came to mind after a month or so. Basically, I'd just go to the list of names from the part of the world the character came from and look through until I find one I like the look and/or sound of.

I don't really do the meaningful-name thing much, of course, so I generally ignore what the names actually mean. After all, who in real life actually has a name with a meaning describes them accurately? It just seems really fake when everyone in a story somehow has a name that could also work as a one-word description of them. Usually when I give someone a name that actually fits them (on purprose; sometimes people might end up with descriptive names completely by coincidence), it's a dead giveaway that that wasn't the name they were born with, but an alias or nickname of some sort.
 
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The way I described it there makes it sound a lot worse than it actually is. I guess I didn't think people would actually take that (very, very exaggerated) description 100% seriously...
How did you intend people to interpret 'Hispanic-sounding nonsense'?
 
How did you intend people to interpret 'Hispanic-sounding nonsense'?
I didn't interpret that badly or even see what's wrong with it. I interpreted it as him saying that it's nonsense that happens to sound Hispanic, not that Hispanic things sound like nonsense. Maybe it's just me.
 
I just try to pull things from nowhere, or from names of people I know. However, as far as spontaneously making up names, I'm horrible with last names compared to first names.
 
How did you intend people to interpret 'a long string of Hispanic-sounding nonsense'?

What I was thinking was something more along the lines of "a long, Hispanic-sounding name that's kind of silly and isn't intended to mean anything in particular." That's really long, so I just shortened it and exaggerated it a bit.

I guess I just exaggerated a little too much when describing them the first time. I figured everyone reading it would spot the obvious exaggeration and realize it wasn't anything more than that... The names are only "long strings of nonsense" in the same way that almost every name is a long string of nonsense--they're just a bunch of names that the parents (or in this case, me) happened to like the sound of.
 
I just look through lists of named until I go "I like that one".

Of course, the names I like are usually of the proper sound and meaning for the character.

I've had to change the main character's name in Leech Child once though. Whew!
 
I like meaningful names, so I like to trawl the internet with a general idea of what I want my character's name to *mean* rather than 'I want them to have names starting with R' or whatever. I do have several fallback names I'm fond of, though, even if they aren't necessarily meaningful. Like Darcy (Irish, 'dark'), Adrianna (Latin; 'from Hadria'), or names I take from Scottish islands or whatever.
 
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