How much time do we spend thinking up character names?
Too much.
That name will represent the character we love, so the pressure’s on to get it right. And no one wants to get halfway through a manuscript and realize they have to make a change. Find and replace on that scale, with something that important? No thank you.
Resources abound on the common problems we see with character names (impossible pronunciations, contrived spellings, too many similar-sounding names), so I don’t need to cover that ground. Instead, I’d like to provide some tricks for finding a name that’s perfect for your character.
1. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Sometimes, a simple name is best. One that’s invisible to the reader and doesn’t call attention to itself. In this case, don’t go through mental gymnastics to come up with something new when there are thousands of names that already exist. Here are some resources for finding those.
- Baby Name Books
- Encyclopedias
- Obituaries. Agatha Christie liked these.
- Your Own Family Tree
- Maps and Atlases. Paris, Jordan, Brooklyn, Asia—get inspired by names of other places.
- Graveyards. If it was good enough for Rowling…
- The Social Security Administration’s Listing of Popular Baby Names by Year. This can be helpful if you’re writing a period piece and want to find a popular name, you want to avoid something that’s too common, or you’re looking for inspiration.
- Name generators. I like Reedsy’s, which lets you search up fantasy and medieval names, as well as those based on certain languages.
These are helpful for brainstorming real names. But if you’d like a moniker with more gravitas that fits your character and story, keep the following tips in mind.
2. Know the Character’s Role
The more important a character is to the story, the more memorable or purposeful their name can be. The opposite is true for background characters, because a peripheral character with an interesting or attention-grabbing name could pull the reader’s attention where you don’t want it and make them think there’s more going on back there than there really is. For those characters, consider a more common name, just a first name, or no name at all.
3. Choose Something that Characterizes
Think about what a character’s name could reveal about them. The obvious tells point to a character’s race, religion, gender, or the time they live in. In some cultures, it could identify their profession.
Also, consider what the character does with their name. Do they shorten it or use it in its entirety in the most pretentious way (Charles Emerson Winchester the Third, anyone)? Do they use a nickname that says something about their preferences, ideals, or attitude? If the character came up with it themselves, it often will say something about them.
4. Explore the Root Meaning
One way to subtly characterize is to choose a name with deeper meaning.
- Beorn, the shape-shifting warrior in The Hobbit, comes from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning warrior/chieftain and an Old Norse word for bear.
- Kreacher—sniveling house elf to the Regulus family in Harry Potter—comes from the German word kriecher: to creep, crawl, grovel, cringe, or fawn upon.
- Shrek is Yiddish for fright.
- And then there’s Percy Wetmore, The Green Mile’s bullying, cowardly antagonist who’s such a wuss he ends up peeing his pants in fear.
Behind the Name is a great tool that provides the etymology and history of many names. Even if readers don’t know the underlying meaning, a name with significance will often work because of the way it sounds or the connotations it evokes. And that brings us to the next tip:
5. Utilize Sound Devices
Did you know that explosive consonants have a jarring and unsettling effect to the hearer? These sounds (p, b, d, g, k, ch-, sh-) can work well for a villain’s name—Gordon Gekko, Krampus, Count Dracula, and the like. On the flip side, harmonious/soft consonants (l, m, n, r, th, wh, soft f, soft v) may be good for peaceful or nurturing characters, such as Luna Lovegood or Melanie Wilkes (Gone with the Wind). There are obvious exceptions, but the sound of a name is a good place to start when you’re trying to figure out the right handle for a character.
6. Evoke a Desired Response
To build on the last point, devise a memorable name by making the whole thing alliterative, musical, lilting, quirky, unnerving, or unsettling—whatever you’re going for. Inigo Montoya, Sam Spade, Boo Radley, Scheherazade, and Ponyboy Curtis are good examples. What do you want your character’s name to bring to the reader’s mind? Create an overall sound that fits.
7. Tie it to the Story’s Theme
What message do you want to convey, and how does the character relate to it? One of the themes of Watership Down circles leadership. Hazel must lead his band of reluctant rabbits to a new home, but he has no special skills; he’s not fast like Dandelion or strong like Bigwig. He’s just a regular guy. The rabbits in this story are all named after plants, so you’d expect the leader to have a grand, inspiring name, but Hazel, in lupine, simply means “tree.” His name reflects the story’s thematic message, that leadership doesn’t require flash and charisma; it often just means being willing to do what must be done.
There are so many tips for coming up with the perfect name for a character. But as always, the name needs to fit both them and the story. If readers are pulled out of the narrative because they’re enamored with (or confused by) them, we’ve led them astray. So have fun digging into those names, but remember that they’re just one part of the bigger picture.
Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.
Choosing names is one thing I really enjoy. In my fantasy books, I don’t use ‘real’ names. And I fantasy I read, I find ‘real’ names does tend to irritate me. On a planet, and land, that has nothing to do with Earth, and maybe in a different dimension, it’s not feasible that someone should be called David or Sophie. Or even Sasha, or Ali.
One technique I use is to combine two regular names. For example, I took David and Michael to come up with Davrael.
Another way would be to look at the score of sports matches. Often, the names are abbreviated, so you could run them together. E.g. Manchester United (or City, I suppose) ahainst Arsenal would be shown as Man v Ars, so that could be Manars, or Arsman.
In my historical novels I had great fun looking up Roman names, Celtic names, Danish (Viking) names and Anglo Saxon names.
But I wholeheartedly agree with fitting names to people. I almost missed out on a great series, Magician, because I thought the name Pug was stupid. (I still do!)
Yes, made-up names for made-up worlds is a whole other thing. But I like that you still can use existing names for inspiration, or upcycle them to create something new. Thanks for sharing your process!
And as I realized after my first book, don’t have names that begin with the same first letter as main characters. (It fortunately worked.)
As a reader of science fiction and fantasy, I usually just brainstorm a bunch of odd, alien-sounding names. Once I have a good list, I match them to the characters. Main character names have already come to me at that point, so it’s mainly for the secondary characters.
Yes! The too-many-familiar-sounding names issue. I especially love when that happens in a story where a million characters are introduced at once ;).
I absolutely agree with that. I gave up on a book because the main family all had similar names. A dynastic thing, it was supposed to be, but to me it was just confusing.