Names that mean something.

¶Every set on this site is built from two hand-made lists: fragments that can open a name, and fragments that can close it. Each one carries a meaning. When the generator joins Ael to wyn it also joins noble to friend, and reports both — the name, and the sense it was assembled from. That is the whole difference between this and every other generator: you can tell whether a name fits before you commit a character to it.

The fragments are not random syllables. Each set follows the phonetic rules of the tradition it belongs to — which consonants may open a word, which may close it, which combinations a reader of that tradition would recognise. It is why an elvish name and an orcish name are distinguishable at a glance even though they come out of the same machine, and why the dwarven sets close hard where the elvish ones stay open.

Where a real language is involved, the meanings are the real ones. Japanese elements, Old Norse compounds, English surname roots and Irish patronymics carry their actual attested senses, and anything we could not verify was left out rather than guessed at. Invented traditions get invented systems, built to the phonetic rules of the register they belong to. Nothing here is scraped from a published setting.

¶A kenning is the Old Norse device of naming a thing by welding two meaningful words together. Old English poetry used it too — hronrād, “whale-road”, for the sea. Every name on this site is built the same way: two glossed fragments, joined, with the join shown. 113 sets, 356,810,321 possible names, and not one of them arrives without its meaning.