Of Names & Allusions

[SckizoBoy]

I'm sure that there are many among the Escapist community who enjoy writing original (or otherwise) fiction, whether as a hobby, or as a profession, or as a bit of both.

So, when you've dreamt up your own fictional universe, how do you come up with names, whether it is for people, places, unique items (i.e. aspects of in-world technology/macguffins) and organisations?

Of course, most common would be the people. For me, I typically base a lot of my characters on real-life individuals or figures from history. So, I do a little research and patch together details of their lives that centres on the person in question... plus a little false etymology here and there e.g. many points and much respect to whoever can identify the inspiration for the names Joachim ten'Klaas de Villers, Vaclav Landek, Charles de Gheynst-Arras and Harold de Joze-Ferrand.

How's 'bout you folks?

 

[Esotera]

I haven't really written in years but I'll generally focus on organisations governed by different philosophies or technologies. Greek & Roman gods are an enormous influence in my universes...

 

[Scarim Coral]

I just say out a bunch of vowels and combine it together which hopefully the combined sounds actually sound like a name, item, building or things in general!

 

[JoJo]

If I'm setting a work in the real world, I generally research common names of the character's nation or community and chose one that fits. If it's in a fictional world, I usually make up a name that sounds good to my ears (e.g. Marek, Roe etc) and often are relatively short since I find long and difficult to pronounce names to be a pain.

 

[Queen Michael]

I just pick names I like the sound of. Which basically means that all of my characters are called Batman.

 

[thesilentman]

I look for names that have a meaning that ties in with my characters. Or I just play roulette and just pick after looking for some general names.

 

[Albino Boo]

So, I do a little research and patch together details of their lives that centres on the person in question... plus a little false etymology here and there e.g. many points and much respect to whoever can identify the inspiration for the names Joachim ten'Klaas de Villers, Vaclav Landek, Charles de Gheynst-Arras and Harold de Joze-Ferrand.

Rough guess , is Charles de Gheynst-Arras the holy roman emperor Charles V? Also is Joachim ten'Klaas de Villers something to do with Sir John Churchill, Charles II or William III. Barbara Villiers was the mistress of both Charles II and Sir John Churchill and her sister was the mistress of William III. Sort of clutching at straws with that one

 

[SckizoBoy]

Rough guess , is Charles de Gheynst-Arras the holy roman emperor Charles V? Also is Joachim ten'Klaas de Villers something to do with Sir John Churchill, Charles II or William III. Barbara Villiers was the mistress of both Charles II and Sir John Churchill and her sister was the mistress of William III. Sort of clutching at straws with that one

It's that obtuse, I tell you! =P

For John Churchill, his name is 'Spencer Thornhurst' (the Spencer family married into his through his daughter Anne, and Thornhurst is his mother-in-law's maiden name... -_-)

Anyway:

Spoiler: For those still guessing... if inclined to attempt a guess...

Charles de Gheynst-Arras = Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma
His stillborn twin-brother was called Charles, his maternal grandmother was 'van der Gheynst' and he died at Arras.

Harold de Joze-Ferrand = Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne
Harold = Harry = Henry, obviously, and his father was born in Joze-en-Auvergne near Clermont-Ferrand.

Joachim ten'Klaas de Villers = Johann tser'Claes von Tilly
Joachim to Johann is just by vague phonology, 'Klaas' is another spelling for the name 'Claes', and Castle Tilly is at modern day Villers-la-Ville, Belgium.

and

Vaclav Landek = Albrecht von Wallenstein
Vaclav was his Czech middle name (well, one of them) and Landek was his first wife's noble maiden name. Fully, the name is Vaclav Landek Waldestijn, but I thought that might be a bit of a giveaway...(!)

Yeah, I'm a jerk, ain't I?!

 

[GonvilleBromhead]

Most of my writing is set in late 19th/early 20th century UK, so I tend to follow period conventions to a certain extent, whilst endeavouring to give a general gist of the character just through their name. So Major Havelock Mackenzie or Lieutentant-Colonel Outram FitzWilliam are quite good names for soldiers, and I think your first impression of what they would be like just from their name would be a fairly good indicator of their character in the story. A slightly oily, overly political, powerhungry civil servant would be perhaps Sir Sidney Dalhousie-Snedden (Bart.). Bill Edwards is a fairly honest plumber.

 

[Vault101]

this is an issue I have

I tend to be lazy and just use stupid placeholder names untill I can be bothered to come up with names..its easyer of your in a realish setting

actuall I have a question...I have a sort of "fantasy" setting...would it be silly to use more or less "normal" names..theyre kind of normal but not common (like Ivy and Issac)

 

[hazabaza1]

It's one of the things that make me not want to write at times.
I have a hard enough time coming up with RPG character names before just going "FUCK IT" and defaulting back to Jack.

actuall I have a question...I have a sort of "fantasy" setting...would it be silly to use more or less "normal" names..theyre kind of normal but not common (like Ivy and Issac)

So long as it's not like "Fred" or "Dave" I could see it working.
Hell, look at Game of Thrones. Ned, Robb, Jon, Jamie, Catelyn. All pretty standard stuff.

 

[Vault101]

snip.

but then I did end up making up one name, last name "johagan" (jo-hay-gan) I guess i hsould probably sitck to one method otherwise it might seem inconsistant if I have a (making this up on the spot) "jalkanah" next to an issac

yes I suck at making up names

 

[hazabaza1]

snip.

but then I did end up making up one name, last name "johagan" (jo-hay-gan) I guess i hsould probably sitck to one method otherwise it might seem inconsistant if I have a (making this up on the spot) "jalkanah" next to an issac

yes I suck at making up names

As someone whose work involves looking at a lot of names, I can assure you that that seems fairly normal.

I've seen some fucking weird names in my time.

 

[Darken12]

I really don't like the trend of making up "cool sounding" names. If it's a setting that already has made-up languages (like D&D), I'll use that to make up names, as I have in the past. But whenever I can, I take up the "Translator Hypothesis" and assume that, in-universe, everything has a foreign name, but in my writing, a place is called "Snowpeak Woods", a person is said to create and control "mindglass", she is a "dustwraith" and we are currently in the month of "Winter's End".

It's a lot more descriptive and immersive to have names constructed with English words than to come up with made-up all the time. The most common exceptions I make are the names of people, races and countries/kingdoms/empires. Oh! And any time I invent a word that doesn't have an English equivalent, or that needs an entire sentence as a translation (most often as a result of a made-up magic or cosmological system that results in concepts, elements and objects with no English equivalence).

 

[Johnny Impact]

For high fantasy surnames I think of two words that go well together: Blood+Bear, Half+Granite, Dark+Tide.

First names are either borrowed from real life or adapted from a random word. For example, glancing at the post above me, the first word I see is "sentence." I play with it a bit, sound it out in my head, and come up with Santeco. "Result" becomes Reshuul, "already" becomes Laredia, "crush" becomes Gruish.

Throw in a "son of" or some indication of profession, and my characters have names like "Serena Darktide, killer for hire," "Santeco Colisi, blademaster of Pacciolo," or "Kell, son of Gruish, of the clan Half-Granite."

Names are often character-driven. I had a half-orc whose name in orcish meant "the gods joke," a reference to his mixed heritage. Humans couldn't pronounce the orcish very well, and didn't care to try, so he went by Joker. I wanted my paladin undead slayer's name to mean something. I chose the words "vanguard" as he was always at the forefront, and "dread" as he was a bloody-minded, uncompromising man whose enemies feared his approach. Combining them, I named him Vandred.

I name magic items the same way I make surnames: Night's Whisper, Oath of the Mountain, Shadowbane, etc. It can also work for place names: Winter's Gate, the Stone Sea, Steepscythe.

I'm also a sucker for alliteration and my names tend to reflect that: Bloodbear, Breakboulder, Knows-the-Night, Talltalker.

 

[Angie7F]

I look to legends and myths for ideas, then use modern kanji to write it.
We are lucky being Japanese because we have phonetic and character based meanings to most things.

 

[ShindoL Shill]

I like to use Behind the Name [http://www.behindthename.com/] for character names.
It's basically a list of names, modern, historical and mythological, from various cultures and nations, as well as all their variants, what they come from and their meanings. There's another site that does surnames. [http://surnames.behindthename.com/]
It's good for making historically accurate-sounding, and occasionally meaningful, names.

As for places, I generally just combine words that describe that area, possibly involving words that generally don't get used much. For example, calling the area around a path through a cold mountain range Frostwynd. 'Frost' for obvious reasons, and 'wynd', which is just a word meaning a narrow street, which makes it both sort-of accurate and fancy-sounding.

 

[Albino Boo]

Anyway:

Spoiler: For those still guessing... if inclined to attempt a guess...

Charles de Gheynst-Arras = Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma
His stillborn twin-brother was called Charles, his maternal grandmother was 'van der Gheynst' and he died at Arras.

Harold de Joze-Ferrand = Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne
Harold = Harry = Henry, obviously, and his father was born in Joze-en-Auvergne near Clermont-Ferrand.

Joachim ten'Klaas de Villers = Johann tser'Claes von Tilly
Joachim to Johann is just by vague phonology, 'Klaas' is another spelling for the name 'Claes', and Castle Tilly is at modern day Villers-la-Ville, Belgium.

and

Vaclav Landek = Albrecht von Wallenstein
Vaclav was his Czech middle name (well, one of them) and Landek was his first wife's noble maiden name. Fully, the name is Vaclav Landek Waldestijn, but I thought that might be a bit of a giveaway...(!)

Yeah, I'm a jerk, ain't I?!

Not far out I got the grandfather instead of the Grandson and the other right period wrong side.

 

[Amethyst Wind]

Sometimes I'll make obscure references to their eventually personality through their names but more often than not I'll just make up a name first then have the rest emerge through the story.

I'm not of the belief that names always have to be meaningful.

 

[CrimsonBlaze]

I'm sure that there are many among the Escapist community who enjoy writing original (or otherwise) fiction, whether as a hobby, or as a profession, or as a bit of both.

So, when you've dreamt up your own fictional universe, how do you come up with names, whether it is for people, places, unique items (i.e. aspects of in-world technology/macguffins) and organisations?

Of course, most common would be the people. For me, I typically base a lot of my characters on real-life individuals or figures from history. So, I do a little research and patch together details of their lives that centres on the person in question... plus a little false etymology here and there e.g. many points and much respect to whoever can identify the inspiration for the names Joachim ten'Klaas de Villers, Vaclav Landek, Charles de Gheynst-Arras and Harold de Joze-Ferrand.

How's 'bout you folks?

For me, I like to have a lot of the names for characters, places, etc. to have a bit of weight and meaning behind them. It would be easy to simply call this character John and that character Suzy, but I like to be a little more creative than that.