How do you name your characters?

[Morrigan 1,826]

Simple enough question. How do you name your characters?

 

I'll be honest I've had a lot of my characters for so long I don't remember the reason I gave them their names but some I do.

 

I gave my character Violet the last name of Selvaggio from a smutty series of books by Christine Feehan.

My character Alice was just a name I really liked and it escalated into a lot of Alice in Wonderland references. She has two older brothers that she calls the Tweedles and her middle name is Red.

Jakeai was just a cool name I heard on a call I once had while working and her last name Nakada is because I wanted it to seem like it came from the word Naked.

Mordria is named after her dad is Mordrid which is a custom spelling of Mordred from the King Arthur tales. Nemes, her last name, is because it sounds like the beginning of Nemisis.

 

I have others but I'll start with those ones.

[Elena 546]

I will reply both for most of the RPG characters and for some novel characters.

 

My sailor siblings, Marina and Andrea, are the longest I have written (since 10 or earlier, both in stories and novels written alone and in RPGs later). Marina, Emilia and Roxana are my favourite girl names. If I had a daughter, I would have named her Emilia-Marina. For boys, my favourite names are Andrei (the Romanian version - but I adapt it to whatever nationality my characters are, usually Andrea, for Greek and Italian) and Alexandru, with a few others running close. So it was normal that Marina and Andrea had always been the inseparable loving siblings (and sometimes Alexandru a first love interest - for Marina or for Roxana. Actually Roxana is a name chosen from history, one of the wives of Alexander the Great, the only one who gave him a son - who had been killed by the generals afterwards).

 

So yes, I have a Marina also in The Wanderers of the Sea  (her brother Andrea dies soon, and she is separated from Alexandru, her first crush) and in The Crew,  an Emilia in The Crew and Rightness 'Friends (where she has an Andy almost brother)... and an Emily Reid once upon a RPG.  Roxana is in Lives in Turmoil and in Other turmoils of life. (with a first love Alessandro, a friend Andre and a Luigi as soulmate - chosen from a list of names, as often I do when I have to choose a name of a certain nationality, and the name and surname have to match. That one is Luigi Accorsi. )

 

For Sol Picador, the pirate captain, I first chose the nickname (Sol Picador - the Piercing Sun) due to favouring piercing blades, then the name (Rodrigo Solano Valera - and Rodrigo Valera is a name which, for me, sounds brave and Spanish, so in Rightness 'Friends  that's the name of the novillero who dies in the arena.) Other names I love -there are plenty, but different from a nationality to another: I love Jose, Simon, Luis, Rodrigo, Maribel, Marisol for Spanish, Sigurd, Astrid, Lars, Olaf, Gudrun for Scandinavian, and so on. If you know my characters, you can ask me why I chose a specific character's name.

[Deep Sea 326]

I try to pick something meaningful or foreshadowing from another language, but lately, I've just been copying what one of my English teachers does for characters in his novels - he just picks names that sound nice when you say them out loud, like they've got some sort of nice cadence.

[Jones 177]

I choose my character names based purely on how they sound. I like memorable but easy to pronounce based on sight names. If I like the name I use it, that's my only requirement. Sometimes name meanings that are unusual, awkward, or contradictory to the personality I am planning will make me consider a name twice. I tend to write in historical or high fantasy settings the most so really my list of names that fit the lore tends to be on the narrower side anyway. 

[CovertSphinx 710]

Depends on the day. For the most part, I like to pick names that have a good cadence, but yet mean something relating to some facet of the character. Afterall, there's power in a name. Many times, part of this meaning/name is a direct reference to another medium or material where I drew some inspiration from. 

 

My imp, Skie, is named after a Blue Dragon from the Dragonlance Saga (because he was my favorite character)- and her last name Demiji was a fun play on "demon" itself. Eventually, I ended up naming one of her daughters "Kitiara", after his dragon rider. 

 

Vesta is named after a villian a friend and I co-authored for a Yu Yu Hakusho fan fiction - I liked the concept of the villain's powers so much that I wanted to flesh it into something more. Initially chosen for its association with "fire", through the years she's sort of molded into identifying more with the goddess of hearth and home emotionally in playthrough. 

 

Eleanor Faeryn - It sounds pretty cute, and I chose her last name specifically to hint at a minor bloodline tie to Faeries for a future plot reveal. 

[ChrisOwl 59]

26 minutes ago, CovertSphinx said:

Vesta is named after a villian a friend and I co-authored for a Yu Yu Hakusho fan fiction - I liked the concept of the villain's powers so much that I wanted to flesh it into something more. Initially chosen for its association with "fire", through the years she's sort of molded into identifying more with the goddess of hearth and home emotionally in playthrough.

 

I use the name Vesta for a character too 😄 An NPC spider who sits on top of the ear of a rather forboding elf feroxamancer/shaman who can speak to animals... the spider is kind of comic relief for this dark character. I took her name from an old Madrigal, which is full of musical puns, because the spider is kind of pun herself.

I have so many characters. One of my favorite is Ruivo, which is a Quenyan name in one of Tolkien's elvish languages, and it's basically meaning "wild fire" because he is a jewelsmith and has bright red hair. Not super creative. Then I took the character to a modern supernatural site and was deciding on the name.... I found out "ruivo" means "redhead" in Portuguese, which I thought was funny. So I decided on the modern site his name is Ruivo Incendios, which is 'redhead wildfire' in Portuguese, giving him a jewelsmithy kind of name, and he is a terramancer/pyromancer on that site from Brazil. Giving him the Brazilian flair is one of his most amusing qualities, and I probably wouldn't have done it at all if I hadn't realized the language connection with that word lol...

 

Mmm... I have so many. One more. Is an elf who started out with the name "Leptafinyo", another Quenyan name meaning crafty fingers or something like that. He was another NPC jewelsmith. But then I wanted to play him on the modern site. I gave him the name Fin... as tribute to his elvish name. And then I moved him onto a third site taking place in the wild west, and he is an Irishman named Finnegan. And we can't stop there, I realized he's kind of the recreation of another character I never got to play in the style I wanted, who was also an F name, though I didn't realize that til after I'd started going on him.

Usually I look a great deal at culture/nationality/etc as I make a name for someone. I also have a Samuel Greene on my wild west site who was an infant dropped off at a Catholic orphanage. (the nuns gave him a bible name and a generic last name.)

And I have Weston Colt... an illiterate man who killed someone and is on the run and needed to change his name. Didn't know how to spell though so he just took the name COLT off his revolver, and the name Weston for the direction he was headed.

 

And then Helene Sommer, who's the German born heavy handed cook at a saloon. Everyone associated with her is named after someone in my own family who are from the city she hails from. Her husband and son Heinrich and Joachim are also family names. But she goes by the nickname "Cookie" which is also thought through, and she's really based on a cook of local historical lore where I live who went by Cookie and was known to be heavy handed with the ladle and cook faster than anyone else, even though she only had one arm.

 

I have a billion characters I could go on forever. I love making names. I'm researching names for some Sioux characters now.

[Bro 89]

Puns. All of my characters' names are either puns or otherwise have meaning to me based on my thought process when creating them.

 

• Andrew Silas Levi is a human man, who was created to be part of a religious organization that is incredibly hateful toward supernatural things. I basically went "How many religious names can I fit in one name and still have it sound normal?"
• Lance Halden is a faerie that became obsessed with King Arthur and the other knights, and so picked the most ridiculously over the top name he could to replace his birth name, Edmund Sorrel. Sorrel is a common plant, and also a name for the chestnut coloration of horses which also happens to be his hair color (sometimes). 
• Adam Scott Smith is a government agent. Agent Smith. The connection here is obvious. Also his initials describe the first impression people get from him. 
• Jefferson Casey is a wizard, and was named after the psychic, Edgar Cayce, because on this board wizards are generally thought to just be quacks and cons. 
• Ethan Chevon is a faerie based on a fainting goat. Chevon is the word for goat meat, and Ethan was a name selected by a poll of my closest friends of 'names most likely to belong to someone who is going to be shoved in a locker someday'. (Trevor was a close runner up.) 
• Samuel Scarus is a flamboyant merman that has a tail like a parrotfish. The scientific name for the Queen Parrotfish is Scarus quoyi
• Stephen Elwood is a druid who owns a very old orchard (el-wood)
• Angelo Abascal looks and sounds like a vampire, but is really an Italian priest born during the Spanish Inquisition. His name was chosen to be both religious, and a combination of an Italian first name and a Spanish surname. 

 

• Tamar son of Edain is my most recent addition. Edain is the Tolkien Numenorian word for 'man' and 'Tamar' means 'Smith'. So Smith, son of Man. Aka Adam Smith. He's a blacksmith this time.

Edited December 20, 2018 by Bro

[Shades 676]

Basically, I pick whatever first name I'm in love with at the moment, and then research the hell out of the surname to make it fit the character. I know nobody will notice or care, but I really love tailoring the character's family name tracing back to something important to them. :)

[Kazetatsu 263]

Often my characters tell me who they are. Some characters simmer in the back of my mind without being named and one day I play it, and the name just comes to me.  Others are more quickly created but when I look at them, I know the character has to be whatever name pops to mind.

[Nariko 15]

Sometimes name generators, sometimes intense research into background and the culture they come from, but more often than not, my characters tell me their name. Once in a grand while, I'll get very intense inspiration for a character, but no name comes to me, and I'll ho and hum about it for a while before choosing one almost randomly. Most of my characters now had some immediate attachment to a name, and I just went with it, but Khalida had no name at first, and I went with an Arabic name that had a cool meaning. Some of their names are really just sounds strung together, rather than "legitimate" names, but nobody seems to have noticed this.

 

A very small, obscure cluster of characters I will write, from time to time, have their name because it sounds a specific way. In example, and this is just an example, naming an assassin character something like Keith because it sounds like a very quick and sudden blade strike. There's no name that really replicates the ring of metal in its sound, but Keith comes very close. I also do have a habit of transliterating names between languages. For instance, the Japanese name Shigeru is pronounced as Mao in Chinese. You can also somewhat retain the sound of Alex in Chinese as Aleixi. This is easiest to do in the East Asian languages, as each language has a different way of saying the same character, but they all recognise Chinese characters, but even very different structured languages have similar sounds between them.

[Huskerdust 625]

I look through baby name sites for names that strike me as “right” for my character idea. For fantasy sites though, I love making up names that sound nice to my ear. I usually take sounds from names I like and smash them together. 

[mystical 8]

i've tended to play on personified sites for the past four or five years, so a lot of my naming energy goes into making sure the characters relate back to their canon spirits. it's also led to some interesting puns on my part xD some of my favorite ones are listed below(in eastern name order because my current site is set in Seoul): 

 

• Moon Noeul - his spirit is Midna from Twilight Princess, and his first name means 'sunset' - so his name as a whole comes out as 'sunset moon', which was a nice play on the twilight/Twili aspect of the character
• Arashi Ryuuto - his spirit is Lugia from the Pokemon movies, and the name roughly translates into 'flying dragon of the storm', which if you know anything about Pokemon, it's p much the perfect name for a character like Lugia
• Arashi Mayuu - sibling char to the above, this one has the spirit of Mew and the name was chosen because it looks pretty well like the sound a cat would make/matches the name - Mayuu, Mew, you get the point lol
• Moon Saetbyul - Princess Yue spirit from Avatar, the Moon surname is an obvious reference in itself and then the name means 'morning star', probs the most punny one thus far

i've got a lot more references than these, but these are the most obvious ones i can explain without writing novels. names have always been a big deal for me, and i always extensively research before i name a character - and once i do, they get tied into a certain interpretation of a character pretty thoroughly. if i take them to new sites, i usually have to rename them because i associate plots and events in the chars' backgrounds thoroughly with that name and can't disassociate them too easily