naming your characters

i first posted this on pillowfort a while ago, but since i'm basically ditching that site, i want to have it here too! this is a masterpost of resources i've collected over the last ten or so years: notes and advice on websites that will help you on your quest to name that pesky OC. don't leave home without it!

if you know of any other useful sites, please leave a comment :-)

start here

• Behind the Name is a great starting point. it has a wide variety, though tends to be stronger on western names. its key feature, however, is the advanced filtering system. you can find names of a particular number of letters/syllables, meanings and associations, or popularity based on a couple of census databases hosted on the site. there is also an associated surname site, but i find it quite limited.
• for a greater volume of names than BTN, there's 20000 Names. i get the feeling there are a lot more than twenty thousand names there. however, it's harder to search than BTN, because you can only really go by one origin-gender pair at a time, and there's no default option for gender neutral names. 20000 Names makes up for this by having a great list of lists, names sorted into categories by their meanings and associations.
• so, i mentioned not liking BTN's surname site. surnames are a tricky beast to pin down, and there are better ways than this of finding them listed in the next section. but if you just want a surname at a glance, i'd suggest the Internet Surname Database. this is exactly what it says on the tin. sorted by first letter, it hosts 26 pages which are just massive alphabetical lists of surnames. each one has a description/definition, but i wouldn't set too much store by them, as they appear to be machine generated. (and like, for this many names, that's fair.) these are mostly anglophone surnames, but there is a bit of other europe coverage. there are also a lot of variant spellings listed. for anglophone names, it's pretty comprehensive!
• for a more international surname list, Forebears is a good starting point. they've changed the UI since i first used this site, and now it's kind of unintuitive and clunky; there are also a bunch of ads that seem to be hardcoded in, because they're getting past uBlock. yikes! either way, there is useful information to be found buried in here: lists of surnames by popularity, by region. you have to click on "most common" under "global surname stats," then scroll up (yes, up - i told you it was clunky) to the menu where you can sort by region, one step at a time. Forebears is also good if you already have a surname in mind; you can search it up and see where it's most common in the world. UPDATE: Forebears now has a tool for first names, too, and it seems like UI has become a little better than when i wrote this post.

dive deeper

• this might seem obvious, but Wikipedia can also be a wealth of information if you look in the right places. once you have a starting point, the trick is to scroll down to the portal(s) at the bottom and look at related pages, or the category list beneath that. just keep clicking until you hit something useful. the best places to start are Names by Culture and Surnames by Country.
• my other favourite thing to do with wikipedia is to make sure i'm not naming my OC after someone famous who already exists. good rule of thumb: if they don't have a wiki page, you're in the clear.
• heaps of great resources have been put together by students of onomastics, a lot of them LARPers or creative anachronists. these resources have a real web 1.0 vibe to them, but you mustn't let that put you off. what they lack in ease of navigability, they more than make up for in depth and specificity of information, including in-depth descriptions of cultural & historical naming practices.
• my personal favourite is Kate Monk's Onomastikon. it's pretty international and comprehensive, although like most sites in english, skewed towards western names. there are plenty of modern names, but this site's best feature is that it has great depth on historical names. remember, historical naming isn't only good for historical fiction - it can be great for fantasy or other world settings!
• if you really want to go deep into historical naming, another great LARP name site is the Medieval Names Archive. this has a lot of information, so it can be quite overwhelming to navigate, and it is definitely not for the faint-hearted. the best feature of this site is that everything is well-researched and cited, and there's an incredible breadth of information, much of it linking to external sites. however, a word of caution - as this site is very old, some of the links are broken.
• if you're feeling really adventurous, you can go onto Ancestry and search for historical records. this takes a bit of fiddling around to work out what you're looking for, but it's definitely worth it for historical fiction. in recent years, sites like this have bought out a lot of smaller genealogical records and stuck them all behind a paywall, but as a regular old browser you can get the basic information, which is all you need when you're looking for names - as opposed to, like, your lost great-great-etc-grandfather who was shipwrecked off the coast of spain in 1876.
• and finally, there really is no substitute for just googling "female names popular in 1910s scotland," or whatever. you can find all sorts of sites that way which aren't necessarily big aggregators like the ones i've listed, such as specialist writers' personal blogs, or forums where people have contributed their research.
• whatever you do, promise me you won't go on baby name forums, okay? or, tbh, any baby name site that seems more interested in showing you ads than giving you info. the information on these sorts of sites is all unsourced and usually unreliable, especially when it comes to provenance, usage, and meaning. i guess the best you can get from it is a snapshot of what babies born within recent years might be called, but even then, there are better ways to do that.

leave it to fate

• Behind the Name's Random Renamer includes options for name origin, number of names, and a surname. it also has a "generate life story" button which i've never tried, but who knows, maybe it'll help you out.
• for surnames, you can use the Cool Last Names generator. it picks out a selection from its 30,000 strong database. the only real caveat is these are not names for when meaning/origin is important, because there are no associated definitions - if you want to know more, you'll have to google them yourself, thus defeating the speed factor of the generator approach. UPDATE: since i first came across this site, the website that hosts it has expanded, and there are now a bunch of pop culture words mixed in with all the generators, e.g. a bunch of pokemon in the cool last names one, and harry potter and voltron words scattered throughout. don't like this at all. use at your peril.
• if you are interested in more than just a name, Seventh Sanctum and Chaotic Shiny are RPG sites that have generators for characters, often including a name.