Really terrible fantasy names

Be warned that my first book was fantasy and I haven't written in that genre since.

When I wrote my fantasy, it wasn't in another world or anything. It was in this world at present time, but I wouldn't exactly call it urban fantasy. I chose pretty standard names for my main characters, but for the mythical creatures and stuff I gave them old timey names that I found online. There are naming sites that might help you, like nameberry or something.

P.S. I like Alder Pentaghast, but I don't know how I feel about Signus Coile

My line of thought is, if I can pronounce it the first time I read it, it's fine. Aldus Pentaghast and Signus Coile are just fine for me, as is Nova. The worst names are ones that throw me out of the story trying to figure them out. You name your character Alfsu'lr'n and I'm gonna put it down. That said, when I made fantasy characters, I tend towards Earth names, although leaning towards the unusual or old-fashioned.

Nothing says you can't use the names you're using. Aldus, Signus, they seem well chosen.

I agree with TAMaxwell. If I can pronounce it without a major struggle, you're good to go.

Maybe don't use Bob.

You can always google a medical catalog and use the chemical names of drugs.

When acid-spitting trolls attacked, it was up to brave Famotidine to save the day!

Sertraline knew her destiny was to bring joy and peace to her downtrodden nation.

Meperidine was the only one strong enough to ease the pain shared by everyone who carried the banner of her homeland. Tramadol had tried, but tragically failed in the same quest already.

Another vote for pronounceable. I mean, I get it, but you're writing in English, with the Latin/English alphabet, so there's only so far you can go into fantasy w/re words.

If you're naming people keyboard-bang things (S'dskrtyy) it's just irksome and for no purpose. If the characters could all pronounce that easily, they're using a different language/alphabet/way to use the letters that call into question why you're using them in the first place, if you see what I mean.

It's like movies in which the characters are supposed to be German or French or Japanese but speak English with heavy accents, even to each other, in situations in which they'd reasonably be speaking in their native language. It only serves to highlight the issue and make you aware of how odd it is.

All that said, I think the Signus one sounds very Harry Potter for some reason, but may be just me.

I think names should have flavour. It's why I actually dislike most of the names in A Song of Ice and Fire - a world of Jons, and Robbs, and Neds strikes me as too mundane (the less said about Stephen Donaldson's High Lord Kevin, the better).

I'm not suggesting that fantasy names should look like someone is cheating at scrabble, but there needs to be a discernible structure (or at least feel) to the names.

To be honest, I've never paid much attention to names - although I do find it easier to remember names that are easy to pronounce (otherwise I start describing them by characteristics when talking about a story). English names and Latin/Greek-inspired names are all completely fine, as are making up names by shifting consonants and vowels around until it sounds okay. But that's as long as they're easy to pronounce.
Names should be like dialogue tags, in my opinion. Unless a very odd name helps build the world or is important to the story, just use a simple one.

Martin's names are fairly easy to pronounce. He even said in one interview that he's so inept at languages that he needed help coming up with "Doth'raki." I make mine as easy to pronounce as possible. The Bible and other religious texts are a great source, with their massive genealogy lists. Inconsistent from a linguist perspective? Yeah, but it makes it easier on myself and the reader. Changing the spelling a bit might also give a more fantasy feel, like "ser" instead of "sir," "Jordyn" instead of "Jordan."

Yeah, as long as it's easily pronounceable, it doesn't matter to me. If I have to actually pause my reading to try to figure out how to say the name, that draws me out of the story--and that's exactly what you want to avoid.

I get inspiration from random players in a fantasy massive-multiplayer online RPG.

Or I use a generator. For pure fantasy worlds I don't like boring Earth names. But they should still be easy to remember.

I recently had to change a race name because a character in a another race had a similar name. XD

I use real-world names. It's a bit complicated, but I felt I was incredibly bad at creating my own, had a specific aesthetic in mind (Baltic Europe/fantasy Tolstoy etc) and decided on the 'parallel world' feel. The only drawback is that Polish orthography being what it is, I have to smooth it over for an Anglophone audience. However, it helps that both America and the UK have large Polish communities (or communities of Polish extraction) and so it's easier for us to get to grips with the way Polish is written. I mean, Wozniak is not a name people are unfamiliar with.

It was actually quite interesting researching indigenous American names for an imagining of an uncolonised, industrialised north American society interacting on its own terms with the European setting. It feels a lot different to just making stuff up.

Anything with excess "look how special and foreign this is!" apostrophes. I also got a personal pet peeve with spelling everyday names differently just to make them different enough to be "not of our time/world". Example: Jaime Lannister. Or Peeta instead of Peter. I know that's petty. Sometimes little, petty things like this just irrationally piss me off.
Or names inspired by real foreign cultures, and then mispronounced or totally impossible by the alphabet because the maker didn't bother studying the language he's naming his characters in. Like, if you're gonna write something with Japanese characters and want to give them "kinda Japanese" names, their names can't contain L, Q, C, Ti, Tu, etc. Or if you borrow from Japanese, for example any name that ends in "suke", and you actually pronounce the U, OMG I can't. Like, even if you're only borrowing bits and pieces of a real culture and language in order to construct your own, GET IT RIGHT!!!! You CAN NOT pronounce "Naruto" "Nawudo".

Ignore me.

Jaime's a real name, though. It's Spanish, but in the US and Canada is often Americanized to "Jamie".

lianna williamson said:

Jaime's a real name, though. It's Spanish, but in the US and Canada is often Americanized to "Jamie".

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A lot of Martin's names are real-world ones (Sandor, for instance, is Hungarian) and even more have real-world connections. When I started watching Game of Thrones, before I read the books, I wondered whether the Targaryens were of Armenian extraction, but as my post above indicates I know a lot about names from those parts of Europe.

Brandon Sanderson has said in the past that he looks at atlases to gain an idea of how a particular language sounds/what it looks like and uses that nomenclature to create his own naming systems. GRRM sounds like he's cut up a baby-name book and is stitching it back together in new and interesting ways. I don't get annoyed by either of those systems; I just found it impossible to do it with a straight face, so I went full-on real-world, albeit (on the whole, anyway) from cultures other than English-speaking ones. (There is an English-speaking part of my setting which plays a role in the stories I write but does not dominate.)

Cyia said:

You can always google a medical catalog and use the chemical names of drugs.

When acid-spitting trolls attacked, it was up to brave Famotidine to save the day!

Sertraline knew her destiny was to bring joy and peace to her downtrodden nation.

Meperidine was the only one strong enough to ease the pain shared by everyone who carried the banner of her homeland. Tramadol had tried, but tragically failed in the same quest already.

Click to expand...

Back in my college o-chem days I wrote about a pair of battlemages called Pyridine and Fenol (can't make it too obvious, I suppose...)

I struggle with this a lot. I'm a bit of a language nerd and naming people and things is both one of the most entertaining parts and also a source of angst since I can so easily fall down the worldbuilding rabbit hole.

Some thoughts:

1. I find that in terms of pronouncibility, if you stick to one or two syllables it's hard to go really off the rails. Also, in the real world a lot of the time people with longer names will go by a shortened version of their name. So your character might be officially (for whatever that's worth) named Syndastran Othelli or whatever but go by Synn in day to day life.

2. Behind the Name is a great site for looking at the linguistic origins of first names (they also have a random name generator!), and for finding related names in other languages. The Online Etymology Dictionary is also a good source for looking up the etymology of english words.

3. In my writing I'm trying to break away from the pseudo-medieval anglo-saxon mold, but I also don't want my world to be completely alien, since shortcuts are useful to avoid losing people or having to do lots of description and infodumping. So I try to (carefully!) borrow elements of language and aesthetics from other periods and places to indicate the feeling I want the world to have.

For example, the setting for current story I'm working on has an Ottoman Turkish flavour (mixed with some other things, but that's the major one), so to generate names for people and places I took a list of modern Turkish phonemes, smoothed out the orthography a bit (as LouiseStanley mentioned), and used them to assemble words.

Another story I wrote took place in a religious community with a POV character who placed importance on names and titles, so I had to come up with my own version of what the head of the temple and certain other people with specific roles would be called. I ended up going with "seignarch" (which I made up) and "preceptor" (which is a real word), both of which are derived from Latin. (Although -arch is actually Latinized Greek aaaand I will be shutting up now.) My hope is that both of those indicate authority with minimal baggage.

Of course it's possible no one should listen to me since I have so many placeholder names in my manuscript from leaving naming "until I have time to think about it properly" that I'm sure I'm going to end up with at least one "Randomguy said."

My worst fear is using a fantasy name that turns out to have an unfortunate real life meaning. The closest I have come is a hero called Fisk. I do recall reading a book were a female fantasy character was called Shiraz.

lianna williamson said:

Jaime's a real name, though. It's Spanish, but in the US and Canada is often Americanized to "Jamie".

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This is where naming can get tricky.

Jaime, in Spanish, and Jamie in Scottish English are all diminutives derived from James; James is a Middle English variant of Latin Iacobus (Jacob) derived from the Hebrew name Yaʻaqov (Jacob).

AW Admin said:

This is where naming can get tricky.

Jaime, in Spanish, and Jamie in Scottish English are all diminutives derived from James; James is a Middle English variant of Latin Iacobus (Jacob) derived from the Hebrew name Yaʻaqov (Jacob).

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It's interesting to see the variations in names in various cultures/languages.

Just wanted to add another voice to the whole "Jamie is a real world name, not made up fantasy name" position. The version I am familiar with is Spanish, and the J is pronounced like an H. It sounds something like "Hie-meh".

ETA: I really can't give advice on the fantasy made-up name issue, as I tend to do more contemporary fantasy alternative Earth-like world settings, which leads me to using Earth names, lol.

I'm having a similar debate with the character of a fantasy story. It's supposed to be Sleeping Beauty, but with the prince's backstory. And I want to come up with a similar, woodsy name to be the male counterpart of Briar Rose.

So far all I've come up with is Ash, or Thorne, which are are both so heavily used in or out of fantasy. But I also don't want the word "wood" "stone" or anything that could have a sexual connotation.

I sometimes think naming a character is the hardest part of writing anything, really.

asroc said:

Back in my college o-chem days I wrote about a pair of battlemages called Pyridine and Fenol (can't make it too obvious, I suppose...)

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In my D&D days, I played a character named Nyacyn. He was a cleric.