How do you name your characters?

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audibob1

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I am interested in knowing how you all pick names for your characters.

My go-to is the website Nameberry. I generally just scroll through lists until I find one that sounds "right." They have many different subsections of names (like Nature Names, etc.) that makes it easy to narrow down choices.

Sometimes, if I'm feeling like it, I'll google names with certain meanings ("beauty"=Belle or Bella, "wrath"=Odysseia, etc.) that pertain to the character's personality.

Very rarely, I will make up my own names if the story calls for it.

How do you all choose names?
 

Enlightened

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I avoid name generators.

I created a list of first names for males and females and another list for last names (over 200 with each). I need a large list for my projects.

I have specialty character names that are fun, and these are for characters that have unique quirks. The names fit the quirks at times. These are names for characters and non-human characters/creatures.
 

LJD

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I go to the US Social Security Baby Names website, look up the year of the character's birth, and scroll through the top 1000 names. I write down any I like and consider whether their parents would have given them a common name or not. That's pretty much it.
 

Lakey

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I love this topic. I collect names. You know those lists of donors you sometimes see in concert programs or on display boards at museums or etched into bricks in parks? I browse those and write down names that sound interesting to me, both first names and last names. Movie ending credits - especially modern ones with crews of thousands - are another great source of diverse and interesting names. I have one character I named after a football player - I’m not especially a fan, but the game was on while I was sketching some chapter, and I liked the sound of the name. I cut the -ski off the end and used it.

The novel I’m working on is set ca.1950 so I spend a lot of time perusing various sources of names that were popular to give to babies in the 1920s or 1910s. That’s not to say that everyone is named Mary, Mabel, and Richard, but if you go down a few dozen names from the top of such a list you can find great names that have the right old-fashioned feel without being the absolutely most common names. You’ll find names in my book like Grace, Shep, Harry, Claire, Charlie ...

I had a sort of “Greek chorus” of minor characters - a group of friends my main character spends time with - and in early sketches of the novel I just assigned them the first names of the Go-Gos: Belinda, Kathy, Jane, Charlotte, and Gina. I was being silly, but as it happens all of those names have the right period feel and so most of them have stuck. :ROFL:

I had a character who was partly inspired by a character in another book who had a name from Greek mythology, so I gave my character a Greek-myth name too. Other characters I have just baldly named after the real-life or fictional people who inspired them. One character is named for a real-life friend I modeled him after. Another is named for a nom-de-plume once used by a certain author who inspired me.

So much for collecting names. The other piece, of course, is matching the name to the character, and that’s less systematic, more a matter of feel. I like names that add layers to a characterization, when I can find them. That’s why I was so delighted when I hit upon the name Grace for one of my main characters; she is aptly named. I think about who the character is and what I want her name to signify about her, and I look for a match in my sources. For example, for my other main character, I wanted her to have a tomboyish name, and the era had plenty of those to choose from - I landed on Eddie pretty quickly and just knew it was right, so I named her Edwina.

For her last name, I looked to the story I was creating for her. She is part of a prominent New York family, and I wanted her name to evoke that. It also needed to be distinctive, so that when she gets in trouble in the book, people know who she is enough to cause a minor scandal. So I opened up some New York maps, and looked for names of old towns around the Hudson, street names, and other names that one might associate with New York going back many years. I landed on Gansevoort, which is the name of a street in the West Village - and there could not be a more perfect name for this character than Eddie Gansevoort.

Like I said, a favorite topic. You pulled a string; I can talk about this at great length.
 
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Loverofwords

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Nameberry, usually. I explore until I find a name that fits the character well.
 

Harlequin

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Depends what culture their from, or based off of. It's usually easier to find a language which has the morphemes you want and delve into that.

A variety of different requirements come into play with the names; I think I could on endlessly too over that process!
 

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In my experience, the hardest names to come up with are the ones for Fantasy stories, because you almost have to make up the name yourself. for other genre's I've used baby name generators. I've also gone to Ancestry, or another genealogy site, to look through census records, immigration records, or other such records, in a particular region, time period, or ethnicity. It's especially useful for finding last names too. I have a side interest in genealogy, so I have memberships in several genealogy websites. https://www.familysearch.org is one site, needs membership but it's free. The only thing to remember is that Census record takers were notorious for their bad spelling, and many immigrants changed their names after immigrating to the USA.
 

autumnleaf

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I'm from Ireland and I had a look at the "Irish names" page on Nameberry. There are quite a few names that I've never seen before (Bedelia, Aralt), I've only seen as surnames (Callahan, Fitzgerald) or place names (Cavan, Dublin), or are existing names spelled weirdly (Aydan, P'Adraic). The "Native American names" seem to be mostly tribes rather than personal names, while the "African names" page shoves a lot of varied cultures and languages together with little effort to distinguish between them. So if you are trying to get accurate names that reflect a culture or place, use Nameberry with care. If you're writing Fantasy where you just want to get a particular "cultural feel", this may be less relevant.
 

Harlequin

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Even for a cultural feel, I'm a bit wary.

My head kind of explode when people do an "asian themed" fantasy culture and it just... mixes in everything? japanese, chinese, SEA, etc. Or a vaguely European culture where characters inexplicably have Russian first names and Celtic surnames, that kind of thing. Idk. There's a point at which I'm probably overthinking it, but when it's very blatantly bizarre, it can be hugely distracting.
 
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lilyWhite

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Most of the time, I'll consult ThinkBabyNames, put in letters that I'd like to use at the start of or end of a name (the latter because I'm really bad at thinking up female names that don't end in vowels), then find something that I like. Sometimes I'll search by name meaning, but I don't usually try to find names that have some meaning connected to the character. My current WIP is an exception, where the main character and her friends do have meaningful names, but being a magical-girl story it doesn't feel as...weird, I guess?...for the characters to have fitting names.
 

audibob1

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Ahh! I've got a name buddy! :partyguy: I love picking out names too. (Sometimes I get distracted and take way too long doing it, but oh well.) Last names are the hardest for me; I love the idea of pulling them from movie credits or programs.
 

stephenf

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I've got a small online shop, I use my customer's names.
 

Enlightened

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To build my list of names, in my first post, I used many sources. University athletic department student rosters helped a lot.
 

Manuel Royal

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I wander around old graveyards. Lot of good names there.Often a name will come to me soon as I picture a character. Like Jonah Bledsoe or Treana Moultrie.

If a character has to fit in a particular culture, I'll do a little research, look at lists of given and family names, might get something like Zofia Steingarten.

Sometimes a name has significance not even intended by the author originally. Like when Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were brainstorming what later became 2001: A Space Odyssey. They'd already named the main character Dave Bowman before they started using the word "Odyssey". Coincidence or the subconscious at work?
 

Tocotin

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For stuff I'm writing right now, my go-to source is kabuki theatre, sometimes popular plays, mostly obscure ones. I have a 45-volume collection of early kabuki plays which are not performed anymore, and I use it extensively for names.

My second main source is a database of people who were executed in Meiji-period Japan, complete with descriptions of cases and last words and other sad details. (It's a great resource, but it makes me depressed, so I use it sparingly.) I also use names of random people I meet/talk to due to my job, but with care, because I can't use those that are too modern.
 

Sarahrizz

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This. There are hundreds of thousands of gravestones recorded online. For you fantasy/Sci Fi authors, you're on your own.

Yes looking up graves on the web is easy. https://www.findagrave.com/ This one is absolutely free to look up, and you don't even need to sign up for a password to search.

And if you want to research Obituaries: http://www.legacy.com/search This one is free too, only it is more limited to recent obituaries. To look up the really old ones you'll need to get paid membership to different sites.
 

Old Hack

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I don't name my characters. They tell me what they're called while I tell their stories.
 

Liz_V

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Can't believe no one has mentioned Behind The Name and Behind The Surname yet. Sometimes I'll have a nationality in mind, and start reading there; sometimes I have a first letter or a sound, and go at it that way. Either way, I can spend ages browsing name lists, and usually note a dozen for future use as well as whatever I went there for.

For SF and fantasy, the Everchanging Book of Names is also a lot of fun.
 

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I often think about friends that share personalities with the character, then I simply change a letter or two
 

novicewriter

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Interesting! Almost everyone has a completely different method.

I wait for my subconscious to come up with ideas for character names; I think they're inspired by my former classmates' names and, occasionally, characters' names I've read in books. But, if I'm worried that the name I thought of was from a novel I'd read, I research to make sure it isn't the same. If it is, I'll think of a different name, instead, or think about changing one letter, to make it different. Then, I check to make sure it's a real name that's used for certain ethnic groups.

Sometimes, for last names and ethnic names, I'll have an idea of the consonant a character's name could start with, then, I'll just look at random sites that feature a list of first and last names, like the ones that others already listed.
 
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Nerdilydone

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sheknows.com /babynames is good for finding name meanings and cultural names. Also, one thing I do is collect all my most interesting-sounding typos and save them to a file. It really helps for alien names.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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I don't name my characters. They tell me what they're called while I tell their stories.

Ooh, there’s some of that.

I’ve mostly been writing historical fantasy stories set in the Middle East and North Africa. I’ve found some good databases of Persian names (Iranian, really — Persia is a Greek word and they always called themselves Iranian). Properly constructed Arabic names work for much of the area once Islam is established (Oftentimes people didn’t use or even know their friends’ names, which were kind of private, or used nicknames like Umm Sabr (“mother of patience” )).

I’ve even found some tolerable resources of ancient Phoenician names.

Ancient Egyptian names are a pain to research because there is so much dubious rubbish online. Fortunately there’s a great Middle Eastern museum a few blocks away and I have someone whose studied Middle Egyptian in the family so I can pester them.
 
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