What's in a name?

At the risk of sounding like a thread in Writer's Lounge, what is your thought process in name-making? How do you name roleplays? How do you name stuff in your roleplays? How do you name your characters? Is naming the first or the last thing in which you accomplish? Are you someone who takes inspiration from places like books or even poetry for names? Or someone who uses real life people or themselves or just "Ryan" for all their characters?

I hate using generic names, but I also hate using incredibly unique names too. When it comes to naming my characters, its a mixture of balancing between naming him "Gary" and "Geralt". In a modern day roleplay, Gary makes more sense, but is boring. Geralt on the other hand, nobody nowadays would be called that unless they had unfortunate (Witcher fan) parents. Striking a balance between unique and believable is kind of tricky, but fun at the same time.

When it comes to naming things in roleplays like locations or items, I usually don't give a whole lot of thought in them, but I occasionally like to be a bit clever. Using puns or hidden meanings or references can be fun if others understand them.

I suck at quickly coming up with names, which is why I tend to create characterd with stupid names (Wonderboom for example), or characters that nickname everybody.

What I really like in literature is when names that share a theme have a symbolic motif. For example, in To Kill a Mockingbird, every character with a bird related name is trustworthy. I feel like this is difficult to do in RPs, as it's a communal process of naming the cast. This overarching symbolism gets difficult, and I always feel like direct name related symbolism is a lot harder to do, although certainly possible.

I enjoy naming my characters so that their title reflects what they're like, usually in foreign languages. As for threads, I use titles of other pieces of media or puns based on words or phrases, slightly changed to reflect the content.

I tend to not put too much stock into names by themselves. Sometimes fun little things happen (i.e. a father and two of his sons having names from the same place, but his third son, and half brother to the other two, having a name from a different location). Mostly though, I just try to give a character a name that can be reasonably expected for the nationality I want to portray them as. Usually the most clever thing I try is implying some family history through the name (Russian first name with a Serbo-Croatian last name, for example).

For me, naming is the most important thing of a character. I always name my characters, if I have no theme, something that relates to a major aspect or trait belonging to their identity. For instance, my Venice character (first one – I had another one planned for their arcs) is Argenta de Bianco. Argenta is based off argentum which is Latin for silver. Coupled with 'bianco' which means 'white', it suits her face claim of a white-haired fair-skinned lady. It's also an indirect reference to her powers of mercury manipulation. Mercury is also known as quicksilver. My Gunpowder character had a far more complex naming process. I used the names of two poets who had a connection to the element of water – Virginia Woolf and Kathleen Raine. The former died by suicidal drowning and the latter basically has a punny surname (rain) which directly links to my character's diluvial powers. Thus Virginia Raine was born.

While I tend to shy away from using humanly names like Jane, Shaun, Henry, etc due to my love of making up names inspired by other languages to fit fantasy worlds, I can work with contemporary names and add a little of my touch to them to make my characters less of a plain Mary or John or Sam. Even the sound of a name matters to me for different names, although same in meaning, evoke different feels in enunciation. Like Virginia just has that effect of streaming water, to me I guess. xD Length matters too. Long names tend to be reserved for comic characters.

I leave naming to the last most of the time because I like to flesh out everything else before the sum of those parts a name. In rare moments, I breathe life to a name when I immediately envision what sort of character would go perfectly with that name.

Naming things is hard, because I prefer to have a punny or meaningful name. It's why I usually try to decide the name, appearance, and generally personality around the same time. For example, a guy who is obsessed with food and loves to cook and eat might be named "Kasey", because it sounds like the word "fricassee", or a girl who loves flowers and owns an herb garden might be named "Heather", which is a type of flower. In reality, these passions or traits would probably have come about long after being named, but it's best not to think about that.

If that fails, I just grab the first name that pops into my head. This has led to places called "This Land" and characters named "Tim" before. Of course, since most of my characters are at least partially inspired by pre-existing characters, I can sometimes go from there.

I think it should just fit the character. Sometimes I want exotic names, other times "Tim" is okay. It's not the name that makes a character great, it is the adventure.

Bob the trainer can be super epic too, I promise.

Ice Goddess said:

Or someone who uses real life people or themselves or just "Ryan" for all their characters?

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I will admit that I enjoy making names that are memorable though. Mostly for my own sake. I will always remember Aberdeen and Ashton from Johto, and Fred Sone who was friend zoned, and Barc who had a tigerdog pokémon. But I'm not sure I like them too weirded up. Last names can be weirder though! You just don't use those as much, at least not in pokémon roleplays. Usually.

I use randomizers at times, especially if I'm not really familiar with the territory and has no idea how to name things. Jaromir in For All Have Sinned have been randomized simply because Vladimir Putin is the only russian name I know.

For Trumpets, I just lifted it from the classical "noot noot" that is prevalent in the game's music.

I for one haven't put to much thought into the names of characters. I usually spend a couple minutes thinking about who my character is and go with a gut feeling of sorts to come up with the name. Most times, the names are fairly simple but, I feel, capture my character in a good light.

Names are super important! They need to be the literary personification of your character, which is hard to explain, but if its a generic name, you probably know someone with that name, or you associate a type of person with that name, for example I associate the name Elizabeth with being rich. Okay, I associate it with the Queen of England who I assume is rich, being an american I could have given a better example, but I Barrack Obama is a very specific name, while Elizabeth is a generic baby name.

Although, maybe really political people will name their children Obama, I mean we already have Hermione's and Khaleesi's... Sorry getting off topic...

So yeah uh, I try and use names that fit my characters personality based on the predefined thoughts I have based towards a name, which I guess is personal preference and could be different from person to person making this a wasted effort. I won't stop though because I'm too lazy to be lazy and stop.

Mm honestly I just find the appearance I want for the character and base a name on what I think they look like XD

Quite the complicated process, I know.

Sometimes it depends on the setting. Gunpowder reminded me of a d20 game that a friend made and so I named Jebediah after one of the NPCs that traveled with me through the game. Other times I'll just randomly press buttons and hope that a name comes out of it. I'm pretty good at randomly mashing buttons to make names. In Dust my character's name and semblance was based off of norse mythology and in Venice Facio and Barnabas were more random letter mashings hoping something would work.

The name should mean something, but not sum up the entirety of the character. Era appropriate names should be given. I'm not against common names, especially not for common-rabble characters, but I prefer things to be a little more inventive and inspired.

Sometimes randomly generated names can work, but then you're just naming your character something cool and meaningless, which is not something I endorse at all. It takes all but 5 minutes to look through a thesaurus or lists of baby names.

I don't name my characters for any special trait or reasoning behind the name. I pick a name that I'm feeling at the moment or make up a name at the moment. Usually, I start off with a letter then type another one and another one, then mix and match to come up with a name. Nothing too complicated.