Character names

[Jack Masters]

What methods do you all use for coming up with character names? I use a hodgepodge of standard systems, but as of late I've run into a lot of instances where none of them seem to fit well.

[Greg Stephens]

I bought a book of names specifically for the purpose of finding names I liked. When you're browsing through the maternity/parenting section of a bookstore looking at baby name books, people tend to assume you're expecting a child. Also, there are a higher percentage of pregnent women around.

[Jack Masters]

Yeah, I generally use Kabalarians.com for real-world names. They're a crazy cult of some kind, but they do have a very large list of names.

Most of the characters in my comics are wacky or surreal enough that real world names don't suit them well though. And once one character in a story has a made up name, the others seem like they warrant regular names even LESS.

In Spongy I avoided the issue entirely by giving the characters occupations or obvious primary characteristics rather then names, and in House of Stairs I only had to deal with one-panel throwaway characters, but now I have coherency and I need names to go with it.

[Greg Stephens]

Here's a great resource for names- A random name generator:

http://www.kleimo.com/random/name.cfm

And as an added bonus, you can even download the entire name list.

If you want to know what a name means, you can try any of these links:

http://www.zelo.com/firstnames/index.asp
http://www.behindthename.com/
http://www.babynames.com/
http://www.parenthood.com/parent_cfmfiles/babynames.cfm

Jack's suggestion of Kabalarians is less concerned with etymology and history, but it's a good resource too, so here's that link:

http://www.kabalarians.com/

If you're not into real names, here's a random fantasy name generator:

http://spitfire.ausys.se/johan/names/default.htm

And another one similar to that:

http://www.sylvantech.com/~talin/names.shtml

And lastly, information about all of the names in the Harry Potter books:

http://www.theninemuses.net/hp/

[Jack Masters]

Thanks Greg, that first link came up with a name that worked.

[Craig J. Quack]

When it comes to naming characters (for a comic or a play), I use whatever method I feel like at that moment. If I'm stuck, sometimes I'll look in the phone book. Other times -- mostly to amuse myself -- I'll play word games.

For example, for The Olive (which is archived here if you happened to miss it), Kevin Pease and I named most of the people in our stories after towns in New Jersey. It's a detail that most people probably won't even pick up on, but it meant that we had one less thing to agonize over.

[catgarza]

they described me to a "T"! kinda scary:

Your first name of Cayetano has given you creative ability, imagination along practical lines, and the patience to pay attention to detail for a while. Although you are attracted to technical, mechanical, scientific fields, you lack the patience to follow through with this interest. This name gives a certain amount of practicality to your thinking; but there is also a tendency to scatter your efforts for, although you want system and order and stability in your life, you are too apt to be distracted from the job you are doing and to become involved in spontaneous interests. You are good-natured, have a good sense of humour, and are fairly easy-going, making friends with those who enjoy a good time. A weakness of this name is a tendency to make promises which you have difficulty in keeping. You tend to be lavish in your tastes and to spend your money freely. You have a heart of gold and are always ready to give generously. Since your feelings are strong and you tend to be enthusiastic and boisterous, you burn up your energies quickly and indulge in quick-energy foods, sweets, and starches. This type of diet affects the functions of the liver, causing either suffering with gall stones, jaundice, or skin troubles.

______________

i sincerely hope that last bit about jaundice and skin troubles is untrue.

[Bob Stevenson]

Thanks for bringing me back. One of the first programs I wrote on my brand new, 4K, TRS-80 color computer around 1979 was a name generator program. We used the names for playing D&D where random was practically the name of the game. I'd had no idea they were still out there. The formula was laughable at the time: consonant - vowel - consonant - vowel - consanant. I think I'll dig it out and come up with some names to use in a strip. Thanks again.

Bob Stevenson
Journeyintohistory.com

[buzzard]

For first names (this may be the same data used by the random name generator, but might as well get it from the source):
http://www.census.gov/ftp/pub/genealogy ... male.first
http://www.census.gov/ftp/pub/genealogy ... male.first

for historical first names over the last 100 years (allows you to get people of different ages right):

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/NOTES/note139/note139.html

For last names I use last names of real people I know and celebrities, and mix and match, coining new names; if I want a name that absolutely implies nothing about the character, I use the white pages.

Oh, I also have a random-fantasy-name-generator in a game I wrote, but it produces wacky fantasy names rather than traditional fantasy ones. I can't easily put it online, but here's 1000+ names from it: http://nothings.org/heroes_names.txt

[rcar]

I work like Craig. When stuck brake out the phone book. I have picked up phone book from different areas of the USA when I can. Common names are very different in other states than mine. I also have used the theme for names. The police in Super Mort have dance names, Charleston, Lindsey and so on. The old people have names from the Revolutionary War battle grounds.

[Craig J. Quack]

For Dada, I don't have to worry about coming up with names for my characters since most of them already have names (e.g. David, Mona Lisa, and others that are still in the future). When it comes to a character like Hugh the Manatee, though, that's a different story...

[gazorenzoku]

I just seem to know intuitively what everyone should be named in my stories, whether they are real world names or not. Often times I rely on methods similar to Jung's automation writing (is that the right way to say it?), wherein the subconscious just suggests names. Thus sometimes I come up with "The Brown Coffee Vampire" or "Not Jack" or "Want Man" or "Negative Space Robot" or whatever... those are definitely the most fun for me....

But for real-world names I just give them the names they seem to deserve. Though I don't have that many people with real world names in my comics so far... maybe if I do have those kinds of characters someday, I will run out of good name ideas and need to resort to some methods for making up names...

Definitely some interesting methods on this thread

vince

[Guest]

For example, for The Olive (which is archived here if you happened to miss it), Kevin Pease and I named most of the people in our stories after towns in New Jersey.

I noticed "Torus" as the surname of a Manhattan Bagel exec. Was that an intentional topology joke? Or am I a geek?

I tend to spend hours going over names that I use for single stories, then changing them the next day. I like patterns like your New Jersey town thing, so I use The Name Book, which I found for 3 bucks at Borders. I'll post the publishing info when I've enough energy to reach the bookshelf. It's subtitled "Names for everything but babies." It names herbs, bridges, saints, protagonists, etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Really engrossing, at the expense of my actual writing.

{n} decaf@poetic.com

[Nick Douglas]

Yeah, er, that last note's from me.

[Max Leibman]

What methods do you all use for coming up with character names?

As Greg mentioned, baby name books are great. Browsing on the web using Google and carefully-chosen key words usually works when I need a particular ethnicity or historical period.

Mostly, though, I just make them up on the fly (no fewer than four Desiderata characters were named when while I typed the dialogue for the first strip they appeared in) -- the only rule I obey is to avoid repeating myself, even in other projects, for at least several years. I settled on the "on the fly" method partially because it was expedient, and partially because I generally have a pretty quick, intuitive idea for a name when a character first occurs to me. Also, I found that no matter how long I agonized over a name (when I did agonize over it), and no matter how unsatisfied I was when I first settled on one, it would shortly attach itself to the character to a degree that I couldn't imagine liking another name better. That may just be a quirk of my personality, though.

[Murak]

My personal favorite method is to take characterisitics of the character I am attempting to name and try to associate them to create the name.

Example: A female character with red hair, pale skin, a quick wit, and an even quicker temper might be associated with:

Level 1
Firebird, albino, fox, storm
-> Firalla? Forfira? Foxfire?

Level 2
Phoenix, white, tail, lightning
-> Pholyte? Lehontal? Portira?

Level 3
If the name is for 'contemporary' use, then find the closest matches:
Pheobe, Portia, whatever ...

Or take the closest name and jimmy it a little:
Pheobe-> Pheyobe; Portia-> Aphorshia

Mind you, the names I use are usually more fantasy-oriented than our world, so there is a lot more freedom there. And this method doesn't always work, and ends up giving you a horrible headache ...

... a very horrible headache ...

... oh, the PAIN!

[Kevin Pease]

I noticed "Torus" as the surname of a Manhattan Bagel exec. Was that an intentional topology joke? Or am I a geek?

Yes and yes.

[Guest]

I myself had the trouble of always wanting to choose a name i liked myself when creating the hero of the story, and as i'm working on a project with at least 10 potential heroes i didn't come up with enough cool sounding names. Now i use a rather precise method:

• 1- choose the profession of your hero (and maybe his age)
  ?2- choose the country, region and/or state of your hero
  ?3- feed this info into a search engine (google for instance)
  ?4- combine names of people matching those two categories (so as not to use actual existing persons, which happens sometimes in a small country like Belgium)
  ?5- don't forget to use those people's origins (a japanese american can be called Bill, but you might prefer to settle for Akira if he is born in Japan!)
  ?6- combine the names you find and see if they match your characters
  
  This works great and reflects the social status very well: Hippolyte is a rather uptight, posh name from 19th century scientists, whereas Gaston is 19th century but more common and less stylish, perfect for a bricklayer
  
  In inventing Fantasy names, i use some shortcuts but try to mix 'em well, so as not to create families of names that ressemble each-other too closely:
  
  Female names ending on a vowel (but never on -o) Killi/Adina/Thallamuru
  Male names ending on a "strong" consonant (or on -o) Bork/Goraff/Patlino
  The more distinguished, the more syllables (Thallamuru the queen, Goraff the private eye, Bork the hunter, Killi the cute little barmaid,...
  
  Also a sci-fi/role-playing game classic: try to get common elements in the names of members of the same tribe/folk/people/race/planet
  
  Ak Lu'Garton
  Jungh Lu'Herdun
  ...
  
  
  Hope it helps someone out

[ragtag]

For anyone on a Mac, and who has a copy of HyperCard or the HyperCard player around, here's a little tool I wrote ages ago for quickly generating names, ages, jobs and descriptions....with editable lists for all.

http://www.ragtag.net/whatever/rpgtools/index.html

See GM's Little Helper. Originally designed as an aid to improvised role-play, but would work fine for throwing up names and ideas for comic characters too.

Ragnar

[Nick Douglas]

Somehow, the name "Hasp" strikes me as perfect for a grunty, lowbrow medieval guard type of person. *shrug*

I use Latin occasionally... "Exol" is the name of my personal favorite character, a nobleman who leaves his aristocracy-saturated homeland to become the Wandering Noble (exul=wanderer/exile). He and his retinue are booted from every town they try to peacefully take over.

Figures that all my Exol writings (mostly in the form of letters to "The Orange Balloon Man") have recently disappeared.