The naming of characters, like the naming of cats, can be a difficult matter. It isn’t just one of your holiday games.* [Ahem. Sorry, Mr. Eliot. Where was I?]
First, it needs to be readable and understandable to the ordinary reader. I know, you are writing a historical fantasy set in the Aztec Empire, and you want to be true to the naming conventions of the language. But you will run readers off the road when they open the cover and behold something like, oh, “Ak’zxtoatl, handmaiden of Xipe Tlaloc, saluted High Priest X’tlak’otl.” Even if you are writing aliens or fantasy species, readers need to be able to halfway pronounce a character’s name. Ditto the other characters in your book. Since American humans tend to find a mispronunciation that becomes standardized, you can name your character Long-vowlless-name and have another character say, “Well, the ambassador’s name is [attempt to say it here] but if the ambassador’s not in the room we call him Richard. If he’s here, we use, ‘Your Excellency’ like the handbook says.” Or you have something like American GI French, where Ypres [“EEP-ruh”] becomes Wipers.
I was at a writers’ clinic several years ago, and a former NYC editor said that you can never, ever call a male character Bob. Yes, Harry Dresden fans snickered, but quietly. TradPub had decided that Bob was not a good name, and that was that. “No one ever takes a character named Bob seriously. Robert is fine, but not Bob or Rob.” Ethnic names that have other connotations, like the name Kasha, might also be less-than-ideal unless it there is a very good reason and you as writer acknowledge that Kasha is close to a cereal brand (Kashi™) as well as being a grain porridge and a personal name. Given the way pop-culture is going, Donald and Karen are probably not great at the moment, especially if you write new adult or chick-lit, or some romance sub-genres.
Politics can also require some naming caution. If you have a Dutch character, or one with Dutch ancestry, I’d stick with Troomp as the family name, not the other form. I named a character Moshe Ben Gurion. My editor warned that that could cause problems in some places because of the association with David Ben Gurion. I changed the name, but I still regret it.
Another rule of thumb is to not have multiple major characters with very similar names. Mary and Mara and Mike could become very, very confusing, both for you the author and your reader. Rhyming names, like I caught myself doing when I had a character named Joe with a horse named Moe**, are not great in some contexts, either. If it had been a humorous story, it might have worked, but not in an eerie Western story. In the most recent Familiar Generations book, the main female characters are Aunt Martha, and Lucia/Lucy. Minor characters include Mrs. Hoffman, Mrs. Scharbauer, Mina and Claire, and Hannah at the coffee shop, and Ellen the ferocious waitress. It’s easy to tell at a glance who is who, and context also helps. One exception to this rule might be twins, and then you still need to find a way to help your reader differentiate between the characters.
Mary Catelli once pointed out that some names are older than they seem, and should be fine for historical novels and stories. The difficulty is that moderns think of the names as new, and they sound jarring despite being correct in context. Tiffany is one that goes back to the late Middle Ages, but that most readers would think of as modern. Likewise, if you use a wonderful older name for a modern character, like Aethelstane or Maximilian or Aethelburga, eyebrows will rise. You can certainly do it, and then have the character make some comment about “Mom was reading Ivanhoe” or “Dad’s a historian of Saxon England.” Or roll with it, and have your character revel in his unusual appellation.
I had someone once ask me about Arthur Saldovado’s name. Shouldn’t it be “Arturo?” Yes and no. When I started the books in that series, I wanted to toss stereotypes to the wind, and so I had a Hispanic gent with an English first name. As the character developed, I realized that “Arthur” had selected that name in part because it is not Spanish.
Jude? Biblical name, and the Book of Jude is considered to be one of the odder, more obscure epsitles. Tainuit comes from a root meaning “solitary, isolated,” which fits the character as well as being from south-eastern Europe. Tenebriu is related to the Latin root for “shadow.” Shoim is Romanian for a kind of hawk not found in North America. Pasaru comes from a genus of birds, and “Bird” is as generic as a use-name can be.
Image Source: Image by HeungSoon from Pixabay
*https://poets.org/poem/naming-cats
**The horse got renamed Joker, which fits both the horse and the story better.
Mad Genius Club 
39 responses to “What is in a Name?”
Haha! Never name a character Bob. Now there is an entire series chronicling the Bobiverse.
I’m amused.
I’m sure the Inspector Morse and Inspector Lewis stories would be greatly improved if Lewis were named Aethelbert instead of Robbie. /sarc
Not to mention the Bob and Nikki series, currently at 43 books and still going strong. (Book 1 is Bob’s Saucer Repair, in case anyone reading this hasn’t discovered the series yet.)
I had not heard of it. Just ordered book 1. One of these days I need to get a Kindle to see if it works for me.
You can subscribe to Kindle Unlimited without owning a Kindle device; the Kindle app for Android works just fine. That’s how I try out long series like Bob and Nikki, or Pam Uphoff’s Wine of the Gods series (50+ books, and I think it’s past 60 by now). It allows me to try out a lot of authors I’ve never heard of before. Many of them I drop after the first book or two because they’re not up my alley, but some of them (like Jerry Boyd and Pam Uphoff, among others) I’ve ended up reading everything they write.
I can’t read on a tablet or phone for very long. I am hoping that the e-ink on a Kindle will work better for me. I just haven’t brought myself to buying a Kindle Scribe.
Wow, the book arrived today. I am unimpressed. I have not read the story yet, but it’s about 20% the size of a normal novel, printed in large print, has no headers/footers including a lack of page numbers. It may be a really good story, but the author hit a bunch of my issues with self published works. I’ll read it when I finish the current book I’m reading.
There are just so many works that have been translated badly to hardcopy.
What is you don’t WANT the readers to take the character seriously?
I note that the name the character has at the first meeting with the readers is particularly important. This is because we have our first impressions there. I was reading an article about naming characters in soaps, and one executive explained that if you’re introducing the mayor for the first time, you can’t name him Lefty, but if Lefty appears in the show, he can, after the viewers know him, run for mayor and win.
We readers don’t actually read every letter of every word. Please, whatever you do, don’t give your characters same first letter names, unless there is a very clear male/female distinction. Mary and Michael (not Mike) are good. Mary and Marty are not. Mary and Manfred are okay, even though they share the same first vowel, because Manfred is noticeably longer on the page.
“Mike and Mary” works well when you’re never going to run into them except as a single unit, too– especially if you don’t ever actually meet them, they are only ever mentioned.
It helps give the reader the impression that they are basically one character. (Which happens even in Real Life– both the impression, and the reality.)
Funny character naming stories:
-The female characters in the Star Master books pretty much to a woman have -i endings on their names. When I was researching Ancient Egyptian to lay down some naming conventions, I saw something about -a endings being more typical for male names, and for some reason I couldn’t get my head around consonant endings for female names, so this was what I went with.
-the dictation tag for Jetay, the protagonist of the Star Master, was “Adam.” After writing and editing the Star Master books on and off for over three years, I still occasionally call Maxim, the male lead from the Hunter Healer King setting, “Adam” in dictation sessions. Author equivalent of calling your kid by the wrong name…I would be really, really bad at the Tom Clancy/Robert Jordan/GRRM cast of thousands thing.
-My subconscious wants me to give Elegast, a background historical figure in my current setting, an evil twin named Eldagast. So far, we’ve arrived at a compromise: if his story gets told, there might or might not be a mirror universe involved, and if so, he can have an evil alternate self named Eldagast.
-One of the wackier sets of character names I’ve run across recently is in Commissaire Magellan, a French police procedural/single-dad comedy series. The main character is Simon Magellan, which is a perfectly fine name, allowing that the explorer Magellan doesn’t loom as large in French thought as in ‘Murican. Magellan’s love interest is intrepid lady reporter Florence. Okay, fair enough. But he has daughters named Cordelia and Juliet(1), and a layabout nephew named Ludovic.
(1) a Shakespeare First Folio was discovered in the 2010s at Saint-Omer, a town in the region where Magellan is vaguely supposed to take place, but the series’ earliest episodes/tv movies actually predate that. https://en.tourisme-saintomer.com/get-amazed/legendary-stories/a-first-folio-of-shakespeare-in-saint-omer/
When you’re making up a whole world of onomastics for a Fantasy series, shortened names and nicknames are useful, and so are names that carry their own local status markers, and names that indicate fictional culture distinctions.
For example…
In a culture with a single name/more syllables being higher status, a character named Rushalentar (4 syllables) is of a lesser status than the Emperor Vlaxinarius or the deity Kippercollicola. All of those names in familiar form might be 1 or 2 syllables (Rush, Vlax, Kipper. When you’re family, but you’re mad at Rush, you use his full name for rhetorical emphasis). Names from other cultures should reflect different language/naming practices, including possibly gendered expressions or respectful forms. This is a simple way of helping readers tell characters apart, by carrying some part of their status/cultural identifiers in their very names, and providing obvious informal name versions for everyday use. (And, yes, as many different starting letters as you can, to reduce confusion).
Also, naming practices may reflect cultural choices. It’s not uncommon in Wales, say, to name children for grandparents, as a way of carrying a name through (sometimes many) generations, and if there are more than four kids, reaching out further up or thru the bloodlines. That’s one way for how you can end up with, say, Ludovic, as a modern name. (My mother’s father, in bi-lingual Antwerp, was a Ludovic, but it’s not that exotic — just the Flemish version of (Eng.) Lewis/ (French) Louis). If I had named a child Lewis, you’d never know it was commemorative. (But if his grandfather were still alive (and this were fiction) there could be social humor when the two of them were in the same place, etc.)
MomRed was named for her maternal aunt. Who lived next door, so MomRed went by her middle name and the aunt went by the first name. It was quite a surprise the first time I heard someone call MomRed by my aunt’s name, and she answered!
Naming after relatives is also common in Tamil Nadu (southern India) – IIRC, it was also grandmothers. So using middle names there is also common.
Two interesting names that actually occurred in my life: an obscure relation of my spouse is named Jacinto McAndrews, and while volunteering at the local library I checked out some books to a young man named Alaric. No relation to the Ostrogoths, though.
I use a style sheet to keep track of names and when I need to add one, especially for a minor character, I look down the alphabetical list and use a letter that hasn’t seen much use.
I use a wide array of baby name books, particularly outside-the-U.S. listings. My Mars series takes place long after the meatgrinder of history. It’s been largely settled by conscript labor and you get a lot of mix and match names because family names are sometimes the only thing that you can carry with you.
Thus, Harriet Qiao Weiss and I use the old German oddly shaped letter for the ss.
Every name is chosen for a reason and sometimes, I’ll change a name shortly before publication for clarity.
Ah, the H. Beam Piper approach. Always cool 🙂
I’m in the company of genius! Thank you!
Speaking of picking names folks can pronounce… it can backfire.
The nice gentleman at the store was very kind about me asking now “Ondre” was pronounced.
Yes, exactly like it’s spelled. It’s a phonetic of “Andr-accent-over-the-a.”
Yes, dang near everybody asks about this.
Marty, who was running the checkout, was notably silent, since it was probably the fifteenth time he’d heard it that day.
I will not soon forget a historical novel written by another early member of the author association that I was part of in the early 2010s – set otherwise flawlessly in England during the mid-Saxon 900s. (We did our bit for each other, reading and posting reviews of each others’ books; a practice now frowned upon by Amazon, but that’s neither here nor there, now.) Her two lead characters were named Lawrence and Josephine. I was thrown out of the story several times a page. The author insisted on sticking to the names, as this was her expanded juvenile novel. It made for an excruciating read.
If they’re Christian Saxons, then Lawrence could be fine (after St Lawrence). Not sure about Josephine – it always makes think of Napolean. Then again, I’m not an expert on the history of names.
Anglosaxon England was not big on naming people after foreign saints. The Norman Conquest produced a BIG shift in names.
Does naming matter much if you’re not writing earth or human stories? For the current project, I write names that are short and easy to say. How much word play should someone use? The villain in the current project is “Evle.” So, he’s “E vil.” That’s an old literary way of naming characters, isn’t it? Another project has a character named, “Ai.” It’s a Japanese name, but it’s also “Artificial Intelligence,” which is what the story’s about.
I would probably try to pronounce Evle as Ev-leh, FWIW. If Ai is the AI in the story, then it seems like a perfectly reasonable name.
Symbolic or in-jokey names turn up in my books from time to time; Maxim has a Cousin Victor (so far unseen) who wrote a book about anatomy. Shenti, the “plain, simple” seamstress from the Star Master books, has a name derived from the Egyptian word for cloth. When I was writing Scapegoating a Hero (part of the India-influenced Jaiya setting), I had a supporting female character who was posing as a fishmonger, and I was delighted to discover that there was a legit Sanskrit derived name meaning “fish-catcher” (Minali).
:gets the giggles:
“Per-VECT!”
Any form of breaking the fourth wall risks breaking suspension of disbelief, and unless your characters are aware of the name symbolism, it does break the fourth wall.
Does Evle break the fourth wall? I suppose it could, but these people in the story wouldn’t see it, would they? I haven’t used the word evil in the story. They’re not speaking English after all, the reader is only reading in English. But, I’m pretty amateur at this point, so maybe I’m wrong?
The point is that it’s clearly directed to the readers.
Would that always be considered a No No? Just thinking about my character named “Ai” in another story about artificial intelligence. When Evle is speaking to a hench, they sometimes call him “Ev,” which seems to me makes his name pronounced Ev le, not E vle. Might that not mitigate the fourth wall breakage?
If you want to maintain suspension of disbelief, that’s a no-no. It’s not like having a character lecture the readers, but it is to that like injudiciously walking on a steep slope littered with loose rock is to stepping off a cliff.
Depends strongly on the tone.
101 Dalmatians manages to set the stage in such a way that folks don’t even notice Miss Puppy Coat is “Cruel Devil.”
That’s another factor. Meaningful Names tend to be comic and therefore your readers will assume the work is comic.
Fine if intentional.
Does naming matter much if you’re not writing earth or human stories?
Only if you’re writing for human readers.
Will it throw your reader out of the story? That’s the determining factor. If your names are too heavy-handed, and too obvious (unless you are doing humor or melodrama), then you might consider a change. “Ai,” can work in context. “Evle” miiiiight be too obvious, depending on the story.
If by old literary way you mean Dickens and Shakespeare, then perhaps, but even they relied on people knowing the Biblical stories and on sound of names, as did W. Faulkner (the Snopes clan). Medieval morality literature often had obvious names, but it was to teach more than to entertain.
Years and years ago, a good friend introduced me to the anime Ai Yori Aoshi (which is a love story), and he told me that “ai” was a Japanese word meaning “love”. I recently found out that while that’s true, there are actually several different words pronounced “ai” but written with different kanji, and the one in Ai Yori Aoshi is actually “indigo”. The phrase means “bluer than indigo” and comes from a proverb: “although indigo comes from the indigo plant, it is bluer than the indigo plant” which is used to say “the student has surpassed his teacher”.
But bringing this back to the subject of names, Japanese has several words meaning love, and “ai” means intense and lasting love, whether family or romantic. So if you have a Japanese character named Ai in your story, people who know Japanese are likely to expect loyalty and devotion from someone with that name. So you can either play to that expectation, or shock the reader by having that person be the opposite of what their name would suggest. But either way, readers who know the meaning of the name are going to come in with certain expectations, and you should be aware of that.
Robin, I don’t know why, but there were duplicates of all your comments in the Spam file.
I submitted them through the main interface and they didn’t show up. So I assumed the submisison had failed, and re-submitted through the Reader interface at wordpress dot com slash me. That worked.
Turns out my earlier submisisons had been marked as spam for some reason, so I was simply submitting duplicates. Oh well, I’ll try not to send duplicates next time.
WP interfaces have been acting strange for two weeks now (as in, consistently stranger than usual.) I wonder if there’s been an update or change in the back-end of the system, where ordinary users can’t see it.
Yes, I think Ai should stay. I am considering changing Evle’s name.