Fantasy Name Generator

[Ifinx]

Thanks everyone for the help!

 

[Ireth]

Seems to me names are chosen to reference some character trait you want to communicate.

I do that a lot with my characters. Ariel, the female lead in my novel Winter's Queen, was named for the Little Mermaid because she loves to sing; the villain is named Fiachra, which means "raven", because of his dark hair and typically dark clothing (which became odd as I found myself describing him more and more as catlike, especially in his facial expressions). Also it allowed me to sneak in a reference to Poe that I couldn't bear to pass up. XD

 

[Kenneth Logan Jr.]

I use movie credits myself honestly, I mean Avatar alone has a boatload of interesting names in the credits.

 

[studentofrhythm]

You know, you could always just give "American Indian" names: short descriptive phrases. I put "American Indian" in quotations because that is a risk you'll take: people will look at it and think: oh, Indians! And I drafted a novel with cultures deliberately resembling various indigenous American ones with character names like Cliff Swallow, Lamplighter, Loud Drum, Stargazer, Catch Two Snakes etc. The AI flavor worked for me, and I realize you might find it distracting. You might find it refreshing though.

After all, if you go back far enough, most if not all names originated like this. It's just that people import them from other languages so that it's less obvious. So look into the origin of some names (behindthename.com is very good for this) and then calque them. You could squish the words in the calques together too. Instead of "John," call a male character "Godisgracious," or for "James" call him "Heelhold." And so on . . .