The Naming Assistance Thread

[TheWombatOfDoom]

Trying to think of a name for your character? King? Kingdom? Continent? Country? City? Ect? Well you've come to the right place!

I've created this thread because often I've seen people asking for advice or help on naming something in their setting, and I figured this would be a good way of bringing those who need help and those who are good at naming to the right place. So if you fit into one of those categories, welcome!

How this works: Give as many details as you can about the name you're looking for, or what the thing is you are naming. If you're debating between a few names, people can weigh in on the two. Hopefully we'll get a good group of people who like doing that sort of thing (myself being one).

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I'll start us off! I have a continent (the continent I'm starting my story in) and for the longest time I've called it Andoria. I've always been keen on the name, and it's always had a nice easy flow to it, but I've never come up with a good reason to have the name, like a founding family or some such. Recently, I came up with another neat name for the continent instead, but I was curious what people thought - Arteria. Another reason I'm wondering if I should change the name from Andoria is that I've discovered (some years after I decided on the name) that Star Trek also has a place called Andoria - its a world in the series. So there's that too.

tl;dr - Andoria or Arteria.

[Emperor Ing]

Well you can always switch a vowel around and keep the pronounciation. Andorea. Sure, "Arteria" is a bit more original but it kind of evokes a rather visceral image since it sounds so similar to "Artery."

As for reasons, there are plenty of reasons to name a continent something or another. The Americas are named because someone misread someone else's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci) horrible handwriting. IIRC, our dear planet is named after a Frost Giant from ancient lore. Your options are completely limitless here.

[Yora]

For character names, I've went to some websites listing personal names and their origin or meaning, and simply went down through the lists and wrote down all those that I liked.
You can even assign these names to different cultures in the setting. I made a list that had Finish and Estonian names for wood elves, Japanese names for dark elves, Celtic names for gnomes, and so on. That way you have a list you can quickly take names from if you need one, and also have some degree of consistency when it comes to the names of characters who share a culture. You even might get to the point where players might have an idea about the persons culture just from hearing the name without having a description yet.

For place names, I think it often helps to have a basic vocabulary for the major races. Things like hill, river, mountain, lake, castle, and so on. When you use these words as part of the place names, you again have some consistency. I think Tolkien did this a lot with Middle Earth, in which almost all old ruins have names that means Something-Tower or Something-Fortress.

[TheWombatOfDoom]

For character names, I've went to some websites listing personal names and their origin or meaning, and simply went down through the lists and wrote down all those that I liked.
You can even assign these names to different cultures in the setting. I made a list that had Finish and Estonian names for wood elves, Japanese names for dark elves, Celtic names for gnomes, and so on. That way you have a list you can quickly take names from if you need one, and also have some degree of consistency when it comes to the names of characters who share a culture. You even might get to the point where players might have an idea about the persons culture just from hearing the name without having a description yet.

For place names, I think it often helps to have a basic vocabulary for the major races. Things like hill, river, mountain, lake, castle, and so on. When you use these words as part of the place names, you again have some consistency. I think Tolkien did this a lot with Middle Earth, in which almost all old ruins have names that means Something-Tower or Something-Fortress.

These are all good points. I'll likely at some point expand the first post to encompass advice from people for naming. Do you have any links to the naming websites you mentioned?


Well you can always switch a vowel around and keep the pronounciation. Andorea. Sure, "Arteria" is a bit more original but it kind of evokes a rather visceral image since it sounds so similar to "Artery."

As for reasons, there are plenty of reasons to name a continent something or another. The Americas are named because someone misread someone else's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci) horrible handwriting. IIRC, our dear planet is named after a Frost Giant from ancient lore. Your options are completely limitless here.

Arteria does look like Artery, but if it was a central location that people often travel to (which it is), then that might be in its favor. Kinda conotates "heart-lands". Just making sure your phonetics are correct, it's supposed to be pronounced Are-teir-ee-ah. Not Art-er-ee-ah.

As for Andorea, yeah, I guess I could change the spelling, but I like the look of it less. If I were planning on publishing this setting in some way, would I run into problems if it were the same name in Star Trek?

[Yora]

Behind the Name (http://www.behindthename.com/usage.php) is probably the best site there is. They have even some short lists for such relatively obscure cultures as Hawaiian, Macedonian, or Manx.

If you are looking for more names from a specific culture, you can often find good result by simply putting "list of croatian names" into google.

[Johnny.JJ]

For the hardcore approach (rather high linguistic skill required):

- construct you own language, starting from defining the commonly used sounds, vowels, syllables, etc. (once you get the idea of how the language pronounces and grammatically constructs, you'll have a better overview of what you can get away with in names).

- if your constructed language sounds somewhat like one of the real languages, refer to Chris Pound's Name Generator (http://generators.christopherpound.com/).

One extra advice to boot: I'd steer away from names that bear a strong resemblance to something else (as in "arteria" vs. "artery"), unless I want to do that intentionally.

[Tragak]

I find that I like a name best when I use a few different methods to mess around with the result a couple of different times, such as plugging in a word into Google Translate and then shuffling/replacing syllables whenever interesting (Generally using the same base language for the same reason, so as to sound consistent even after shuffling).

Example: If I wanted to name a metallic dragon...

"Sword" -> "slagzwaard" (Dutch) -> Slargdaalz
"Battle-axe" -> "streitaxt" (German) -> Straxtet


As for Andorea, yeah, I guess I could change the spelling, but I like the look of it less. If I were planning on publishing this setting in some way, would I run into problems if it were the same name in Star Trek? If you were planning on publishing, you should change it, but it's not stealing unless you sell the thing you (accidentally) took :smallbiggrin:

[Tzi]

I mainly have a country and a few cities I could use names for....

One is a closely tied confederation of city states that lives partly underground, partly in large crater holes in a massive plateau. They are at least in appearances similar looking to the Drow or Dark Elves of the Lineage games. Culturally they are a strange mix of Victorian Occultic beliefs, and the 1920's in America. One city-State is called Dahlia City. Other cities I've yet to name, but there are 4 others forming 5 in total. Their actual country is yet to be named. I thought of calling in Nektelassia but that is to similar to the everquest 2 place Nektotropis Castle. All of got is "Confederacy of _______" Or "Republic of ______" Or possibly some Acronym kinda like how U.S.A is or U.S.S.R or any of those.

The remaining cities, Like Dahlia City they have political systems mostly ruled by powerful houses coming together that form gangs and dynasties. Dahlia City is effectively run by an elite family with executive power, and has a legislative council elected by popular vote and a second legislative council representing the ruling families or the various "Dahlias."

One is run by a group called the Harlequins, as each leader takes on the appearance of a Harlequin. The city is also more of an entertainment capital and media capital, thus the city leadership found that name for their leadership to be fitting.

Others I have less lore for but their society is more industrialized, steam punk technologically speaking or close to it. They also have electrified cities. One is primarily a mining city and is entirely subterranean, 1 seems to be largely farming as it is within a large crater basin and grows most of the food. and 1 is near volcanic vents and gem mines and is a mix of mining and large scale powerplants.

There is a 6th small city that acts as the confederated capital and central administrative city for the National government. Its mostly small and basically the headquarters for the United Military, Civic administration and arbitration between the various city states to prevent internal warfare, and spy agencies, Civil Defense ect...

So in short, National name, preferably one easily Acronymed. And 5 city names. References to 20's, 30's, 40's era America are welcome. For example Dahlia City is named for the Black Dahlia murder.

RESPONSE TO OP

I like Arteria more, but mainly because the word in my head sounds more resolute. Its hard to explain.

[TheWombatOfDoom]

If you were planning on publishing, you should change it, but it's not stealing unless you sell the thing you (accidentally) took :smallbiggrin:

If its not the name of the world in star trek, and only a continent in my world, with no other resembling features to the other, is it still infringement?