Character name generator

A character name generator gives you believable first and last names to try on a character. Pick a country or culture and a gender, and this one combines real given names and family names from that culture; Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Russian and other names appear in their own script with a romanization. Fantasy styles build invented names from syllables instead, so it also works as a fantasy character name generator.

How to use the character name generator

1. Choose an origin, or leave it on any origin for a mixed list.
2. Choose a gender, or leave it open.
3. Generate until a name sounds like the person you have in mind, then copy it.

How to choose a name that fits the character

A name carries age, class, place and family before the character says a word. Use the generator for raw options, then test them against what you know about the person.

• Date it. Popular names change every decade. A woman born in 1950 and a girl born in 2015 rarely share a first name, so think about the year they were born, not the year the story is set.
• Place it. A family name says where a character's family comes from; a first name says what the parents hoped for. A character with a Polish surname and a very American first name already has a backstory.
• Keep the cast distinct. Avoid names that start with the same letter or have the same number of syllables for characters who share scenes. Readers skim, and Mara and Maya on one page will blur.
• Say it aloud. Actors will say it hundreds of times, and other characters will shorten it. Check the nickname too.

Popular first names by decade (US)

A first name is the quickest way to date a character. These were the five most common names given to babies born in the United States in each decade, according to the Social Security Administration. A character born in the 1970s and called Jennifer will read as exactly that age; the same character called Olivia won't.

Use the most popular names for ordinary people in the background and something a little less common for the leads, so the main characters are easy to tell apart. Other countries publish similar lists through their statistics offices; search for the country and "most popular baby names" with the birth year.

Names in other scripts

For cultures that write in another script, the generator shows the native form first and a romanization after it. Japanese names include the kana reading, and Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese names follow the family-name-first order used in those languages. When you write the name into an English-language screenplay, the usual practice is to use the romanized form and introduce it in CAPITALS the first time the character appears.

Fantasy and science-fiction names

Fantasy styles combine syllables into names that sound like they belong to one world: lyrical, harsh, ancient or starfaring. Pick one style per people or planet in your story, so names from the same place sound related. For villains, the villain name generator adds epithets and codenames.

Keep your characters in one place

In Scenaloom, every character in your script appears in the story bible with the scenes they are in, and renaming a character updates the script. Start a project free and paste a name in when you introduce the character, or read how to introduce a character in a screenplay.