Okay, guys, I’m the first one to admit that I have serious problems. Word problems, to be exact.
No, I don’t mean my tendency to typo as I breathe, or to occasionally lose a word mid-sentence.
I mean that having some passing acquaintance with a lot of languages I have serious issues with people’s naming of characters.
To understand the level of my problems, I’m much happier with the old apostrophes are for aliens (or future people) than with the name confusion in a lot of novels….
And I will freely admit right here that most of these problems are probably from the eighties and nineties, because I’ve been reading back through a lot of past best sellers I either never read (broke and reading from the free book rack) or read but don’t remember at all (I find that unlikely. I sometimes forget details, but I usually remember the general gist.)
Anyway, what I’m finding is names that make no sense. These are not the real names, but the origins are the same: Warlord Chun Bao has a son named…. Serif. What? Seriously?
Or there’s a family of Umed, Yama, Tasi and …. Henry.
The current book I’m reading is bad enough, okay? There are two races, one friendly, one enimical, whose name differs by one letter. But on top of that the naming scheme is as above.
It’s a good book, except for that, and maybe it doesn’t bother anyone else?
However, for the sake of not having Sarah pull out all her hair, let’s go over some simple name rules. Maybe no one else really consciously cares, but trust me, when you’re telling a big, complicated lie, it helps to take care of the little details that are relatively easy to shore up the unseen parts.
Let me explain: you can only show portions of the world, and people have to believe the rest is there. Things like consistent naming will help them believe that.
It will help the think that behind those pretty facades there are other houses, and the world is solid and real.
So, some simple rules for naming.
FIRST AND VERY IMPORTANTLY, YOU NEED TO BE AWARE OF THIS SITE: Behind the Name.
It has a slightly less impressive sister-site: Surnames.
Then there are various fantasy name generators and futuristic name generators. I often don’t use the name suggested, but use it to scramble something else out of them.
1- Make sure you don’t have many characters with the same name. This can be a problem in a formal culture where people go by their surnames and your plot calls for two brothers, or cousins. So, put in a cute bit up front, where one of them gets a nickname.
2- if you can try not to have two characters with really similar and visually similar names. What do I mean? Well, Sherry and Sheryl are technically the same name to me, because I’m dyslexic. So while reading those two are really easy to confuse. BUT worse, if it’s made up names and you have Pulgo and Rulgo? I’m going to keep confusing them, which really bumps me out of the story. Yes, I do know in the real world people have similar names. that’s not the point. you’re creating an illusion.
3- Is nameless
4 – If you’re doing a series of tribal names, or something, even if it’s a wholly made up civilization, try to go to behind the name, and do all the same tribe from the same nation.
5- Pay attention to the origin of the name. If in your world Christianity never happened, and Judaism is a little obscure cult, ix nay on the Biblical name-ay. Go for the Celtic or Saxon names that have other origins.
6- If you have an alien named Henry, there better be a good story to go with it.
7- If your names are wholly made up, it might also be a good idea to hit behind the name and scramble names all from one nationality, say, to make up your nationality of utterly alien people.
8 – The vexed apostrophe question. You know what? If you want apostrophes or dashes in the names? Go for it. Explain that the apostrophe or dash stand for a tongue click, then have them as much as you want. or have the apostrophe -off prefix or suffix make some sense as son of, daughter of, from the place of, whatever.
Okay, if you’re sending it to trad pub, you might not want to have them, because I think they’re still stupid about those. Depends on how invested you are on being accepted by them.
9 – Now do the same for places.
What do I mean? Well, for one don’t have similar names for dissimilar places. Even if there’s a logical reason for it, you’re going to lose dyslexic readers, or confuse the heck out of them.
10 – Even if you are not using real place names from our world, but creating them from whole cloth, look at the names from a region and scramble those, for a single culture. A certain rhythm and tone. And it comes across as the same culture. Or a different one, if that’s what you’re going for and use the scrambled place names of a very different Earth language.
Now go forth and name all the things. In a way that doesn’t drive me insane. Which you know is your main objective, of course.
Mad Genius Club 
66 responses to “What Shall We Name The Baby”
with Henry, i have to wonder if it was a temp name that was never replaced…
If it were me, it probably would be. There’s a guy whose adventures I’ve been brainstorming for just about a year, who was Henry until a couple months ago.
I’ve had cases where the characters in a secondary world fantasy absolutely insisted they had real European names, but usually I’ve done my best to avoid more obvious Judaeo-Christian ones. Except for the hero’s uncles, one of whom insisted on being Ambrose, and the other of who I managed to argue down from Gustav (more aggressively Germanic than I liked) to Jerome. And hopefully they’re not that obvious to random readers.
Switching the Space Egyptians from dictation tags to names suitable for the setting was probably the most fun but also the most exhausting naming routine I’ve put myself through.
I’m not dyslexic, and having too many names starting with the same letter confuses me. I try to make sure that my three or four main characters and close seconds all have names that start with a different letter.
Thank you, Sarah, for the links to the naming sites. I’m starting a new book with completely new characters, and I need a new name every time I turn around. Fortunately, names from black lung cases in my distant past are available.
I have found having a list of how many names start with a character helps spread them around.
For the Merchant books, I dig around the baby-name sites and pull a large batch of boy and girl names from regions that sort of fit the subcultures and characters. Then I do a little scrambling of names, and eliminate those that are too well known (Adolph, Otto, Sigfried) or that are the same as the main character from a different book in the series. Place names use the common convention of a name that fits the location, like “[River]ford, [Founder]town” and so on.
And yes, I try very hard to keep from having overlapping initial sounds for major characters, or important minor ones.
Tvtropes has an entry for Aerith and Bob , with links to examples.
lol came here to say just that. There’s a reason it’s a trope–most people find it jarring, and yet it keeps happening…
I have a set of international baby name books. On my Mars, the characters’ distant ancestors went through the meat grinder of history to get there. Often, the only survivor from Olde Earthe customs was names.
I try to show the mixing and matching of disparate families with names like Harriet Qiao Weiss and I use the old Germanic fancy B for the ss.
I keep a style sheet for each book and for the series. I try very hard to never use the same opening letters or if I do, I have a darned good reason!
I have spent an inordinate amount of time on baby name websites. I’m sure google’s algorithm has a VERY confused profile on me.
well, at one time, ten years ago, it was convinced I was pregnant.
Heh. Amazon and google both were convinced I was pregnant, too, for a time. And I don’t even have the required equipment for it, nor have I had the female company for it for some time now.
Book research leads to schizo algorithms. Either that, or the magical hamsters that run the interwebs were off their meds.
Then there’s the problem of very long names.
Not only the problem of “how to pronounce them”, but would the characters actually use those long names in discussions/conversations.
Note, IIRC Pam Uphoff had one of her fictional cultures using very long names and it caused problems when she wrote more stories featuring that culture.
this jumped out at me:
Doležal Czech
Nickname for a lazy person, derived from the past participle of the Czech verb doležat “to lie down”. hmmm
oops
I knew someone of that name in NOLA who fit the description, but I doubt they were Czech (bit too tan)
Wait… Dolezal basically means “lazy person”? *thinks back to a certain notorious character from years back who decided she was black…*
who? (~_^) by the by, the NOLA person was not ‘black’ nor pretending (too much work, that)
For the love of all things Holy, please don’t do what David Weber did in the Safehold series. (common sounding names with convoluted spelling). I love the series as audio books, where someone else does the translation; but can’t get through more than just a few pages of the print or ebook version.
IIRC even David Weber thinks that was a mistake.
Mind you, I’m rereading that series and what annoys me are his noble characters where David uses both the character’s actual name and refers to the character by his title “name”.
Made up example, Joe Smith is also Duke of Hamster. So sometimes he’s Joe Smith and other times he’s Hamster (or Duke Hamster). [Crazy Grin]
That is accurate to nobility.
I’m sure that it’s accurate but it’s “interesting” for the reader. 😉
Weber did the same thing in the Honor Harrington books. See Hamish Alexander, Earl of Whitehaven, aka Admiral Whitehaven.
See I saw that as a world building trick. The bastards that established the religion and the colony, designed everything including the spelling of names, to make it as hard as possible to develop Tech. Yes, I know they had their reasons, AND they also had a bad case of the power-mads. When you even mess with the spelling of common names, to make learning harder, that’s some serious fuck-fuck. (of course I have a D&D character named Phydeaux, so YMMV)
Minor nit, names in the early Safehold time-setting (when the angels were still around) were spelled normally.
David Weber was trying to be “fancy” by showing language/spelling drift.
And as I reported, apparently even he thought it was a mistake.
Actually, I had a worse problem with Czech names in part of the Honorverse. In Safehold, I just learned to pronounce them semi-phonetically as English, and could power right through.
Alien names – I do have a species with apostrophes. They separate (in transliteration) hard consonant sounds, like “T’K…” or “Ch’K…”, etc. Prefix signifies a “tribal” affiliation, suffix is the “given” name. Much work to do yet on names there, but fortunately not until four books from now.
(I am manfully resisting going down the rabbit hole of working out their writing – I don’t need it, but it would be fascinating as a phonetic system that looks exactly like ideograms.)
D&D characters and PCs are why my Facebook and Word doc dictionary cry.
First, thanks for those two links, coming up with names drives me nuts, and my head doesn’t work like other peoples, I’m STOPPED until I have a name for the character. That little @#$ in my head says, “Nuh-uh, I’m not going to let you see any more of the story, until you give this guy a name!”
That said, while name origin is fairly important for historical novels, by the time you get to the new world, you get weird shit like me.
My middle name had been carried by the first born male of the first born male for at least 4 generations. But it will break your (yes Sarah, YOU in particular) head: Morrigan. I’ll provide a picture of my military ID if you doubt me.
I have the same issue with not being able to write till I have a name.
Also this might be useful: https://www.name-generators.org/futuristic-names.
I don’t doubt you. My brother’s first name is a cognate of Avrim and has similarly been carried in the family, uncle to nephew OR grandfather to grandson for who knows how long. Brother is still salty we didn’t give it to oldest.
Again for scifi this is less important. Though it can still be “uh” when it pops up.
My problem is that even once I have a name, I forget the durned thing until I get back to writing and look at the character sheet. (I wish that real people had character sheets – I can’t ever remember names, just faces.)
I can outline, but not write, without names.
Same
Outlines? what is this thing of which you speak?
You should do them, even if after you write the book, to figure out the editing. It helps you learn structure. (No, seriously.)
Oh, they vary from writer to writer. They are never the thing with indents that your teacher made you write — at least, no writer I know outlines like that. It’s a very, very, VERY rough first draft.
I do wonder when authors use Christian given names (i.e. saints’ names) in a culture wherre — as you say — Christianity never happened. Also, what about cursewords. Obscenity is OK, but profanity? Does it mean the same thing there as here?
Most Christian names started out as either a Jewish name or a pagan European name (barring a few weirdos who think it’s okay to name your kid after any Biblical figure, good or bad, Hebrew or Philistine or whatever), so if you’re doing a faux-European setting, any Indo-European name will do that isn’t screamingly Christian or modern to a bunch of English speakers (William, Peter, Henry, Patrick, Louis, Charles…)
If you’re using Biblical names you are overwhelmingly using Semitic-derived names (with a few Persian, Greek and Roman ones thrown), and probably a lot of the Old Testament ones would pass muster in a setting with a vaguely Semitic language. New Testament names (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, James, Simon, Mary, etc) are generally too familiar and would strike an English-speaking the same way as the Indo-European examples above.
Well, some Puritans would throw open a Bible and pick the first sex-suitable name. I remember one novel best for the hero’s little sister being Queen of Sheba.
And some deliberately choose names like Jezebel, or Ananias, or Sapphira, the purpose being to teach conviction of sin.
That last part actually makes a certain amount of sense; I had never heard that explanation before.
It doesn’t mean the same thing in Portugal. without Protestant influence, everyone call on G-d all day long, and it’s not considered a bad thing.
I see that also in some of the Italian and (period piece) French shows I watch: calling on God as an instinctive quasi-prayer with no disrespectful intentions. Even the atheistic/deist rationalist inspector in Criminal Games does it. Inspector Rex, made twenty+ years ago and set in Vienna, codes characters who do it as kind of quaint fuddy duddies or hypocrites, but it’s also present there.
I have 5 different baby name books (most acquired while naming babies!) One is based on horoscope, one is “International Names”, one is “unusual” names. I will often take (for fantasy/sci-fi) and take the closest culture as the starting point. My elves I have gone back into the culture and they have naming conventions that are aglutinative based on male/female, birth order, how noble, etc. And yes, mixing parts of names together to get new names is common, as most all my kids got named that way. Only one doesn’t use his given “wierd” name, and that’s only because he had problems with people pronouncing it, even after hearing it, so he shortened it. (Tyrnan – he shortened to Ty )totally different pronunciation!))
I have one that suggests compatible sibling names, which is of some help to get compatible names.
When I do character names, I make a list of all the names I used.
…and at this point, I might even get into their geneology, if only in self-defense for one story.
And to answer the question of what would happen if/when in your Regency romance novel one of your protagonists is fully gender-swapped and where she now stands in terms of inheritance…
Swedish Meatballs!
I scrolled by too fast and thought that was a clip of John Bigboote, who, strangely enough, also fits the point.
Unrelated, love your icon. 😀
It’s been ages since we had breen.
In a way, it helps that the wip is in a world I cooked up for a fanfic thing. So it has about three centuries of events, a major religious war (by accident) and technically three founding cultures that I am studiously not talking about in the book proper…
A trick I’ve used is taking the same category names and then saying them, or finding someone on line saying them, and try to spell that.
If it’s a long name, have a bit where someone actually tries to say it a few times before someone throws their hands in the air and says “Bob. We’re going to call you Bob.”
And name origins are fun, Spaceman Jon gets really confused at his death cult friend spelling something “John” and saying it completely different. (He’s even more confused when said person pulls out Greek, Latin and Hebrew, most of which his translator refuses to process.)
Translating that out of name geek glee, you can use the names to info-dump!
Yep, like when I wanted a fox themed name for the seamstress-spy’s dad, and didn’t like the Egyptian and Romance language options, so I did some research and phoneticized the Magyar for “foxfur” as Roukazor. (And threw in a bit of handwaving about his name obviously coming from some sort of minority ethnic group.)
Oh, just thought of something. Pam Uphoff frequently deals with same surnames in formal settings in the Alliance by the convention of appending their number in the line of succession to the Citadel. Only works with a culture like that, of course.
1. Is a Problem with some novels. But Sharon Kay Penman who writes historical novels on Richard the Lion Hearted got around this with different spells of same names Kate and Catherine, or used one the real person names John Trump instead of Donald. Etc.
2. I BEEPING HATE IN FANTASY. Especially if I am running a D&D module and the minor and major NPCs have the same FREAKING beginning letter and are presented half a page apart.
3. The investigators are looking for 3.
4. Harrumph.
5. Harrumph.
6. harrumph.
7. Harrumph. Harrumph.
8. I Still hate Apostrophe names.
9. Harrumph.
10. Harrumph.
*sigh*
I had the same challenge with my first historical, in which there were no-kidding-real people, who for the sake of historical verity, I had to use their real names. But in the party of fifty or so people, there were, IIRC 4 different men named John, and about six named Mary. Same workaround – different spellings, diminutives, or using first-name-middle name combination
I have a Henry, but he doesn’t go by that. Most call him Doc, or Z. His given name is Jewish by way of Russian, with a side of lost wars, city-sized camps that became actual cities, war prostitutes, and quasi-legal shenanigans.
I also called his hometown “City 4” for a reason.
I’ve also a Samuel Gunzmann, Emilio Sorle, Farah Delveccio, that have their own reasons for being named that, and several others. The new kids have polyglot problems with Belter names (mishmash cultures that sum up to frontier attitudes).
There’s also the factional issues that have their own culturally linked naming systems. Probably spent too much time on worldbuilding…
Nah. No such thing!
H’n’n’Ryy eventually learned to tolerate the human mangling of his truename.
D’dkd’dkfdjl’d was pleased to learn that humans had a name that meant “home – rule.”
Hmm. Names. I just think of names for SF, or make them up from other ones. I try not to use the same starting letter much either unless they are completely different. Cardo and Rando are the closest in the current project, but they don’t often appear together in action, so I think that’s Ok. I have a Vyxi for a female hench from Vixen, a female fox. Others from whatever comes to mind. Nothing based on any language consciously. Same thought for place names? I’m using Yasdar Town, the Outlands, and Abereen.
TX Red’s latest post popped a Western title into my head with a surname attached to it: The Last Trail of Marshal Goodsby. I just wrote Goodsby out of thin air, then DDGed it, and found out Goodsby is a real name. I think I’ll use it if I can ever get around to writing it.
Movie credits are great for inspiration. Five minutes and a pen will get you loads of interesting names. Just mix, match, and mangle until you find something you like.
That doesn’t solve the sci-fi problem, but it helps if your brain is stuck in a rut of “Bob Henderson” and “Mary Smith”.
I know someone who got through War and Peace in college (full of characters with intensely similar names) by stringing up a clothesline in his dorm room, filling out index cards with the character names, nicknames, and antecedents, and clipping them together as they interacted.
In my SF short stories I like to pull first and last names from different ethnicities/cultures (and sometimes physical descriptions from a third), to imply that mankind has pretty much amalgamated.
Two stories had aliens. In one I didn’t give them names because it wasn’t necessary; in the other, the alien was a member of a telepathic species, so didn’t have one (no speech –> no words –> no names).
Yeah. That works fine. Again, in SF there could be reasons. In fantasy it’s just annoying.
General principle- “work with the reader!”
My go-to resource is “Gary Gygax’s Extraordinary Book of Names” for RPG worldbuilding. (Just checked what copies are going for these days, and feel kinda bad for suggesting it at this point. Getting into academic textbook range.)
There’s a company called Ennead Games that makes name generators for scifi, fantasy, etc. Not just people but things, religious orders, etc. The individual pdf files aren’t that expensive, either.
? Link?
Here’s their store on DriveThruRPG: https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/3475/ennead-games
which is where I buy them.