The right namefor when and where they were born.

What a character’s name tells the reader

Names carry information whether you mean them to or not. A Jennifer is most likely born in the 1970s or 80s in the English-speaking world; a Mildred is from much further back, an Isla much more recent. A family name places someone in a country, sometimes in a region. Get it wrong in contemporary or historical fiction and readers who know the place notice: the 1940s schoolteacher called Madison, the Norwegian village where everyone has an English surname.

Names also carry the parents’ choices. A child given the most popular name of their year says one thing about the family; a child given a rare, old-fashioned name says another. Writers often pick names they like, from their own generation, and end up with a cast whose names belong to the writer’s schooldays rather than the characters’.

The fix is not research for every minor character. It is a generator that knows the data, so a plausible name for the time and place is a click away and you can spend your attention on the names that matter.

Real names, from open data

Authrot’s real-name packs are built from open data: national statistics offices, census records and Wikidata, each credited on our credits page. Choose a pack by country or language, set a birth decade, choose a sex where the data is recorded that way, and say whether you want common names or the long tail. The dice draw names weighted by how common they were for people born in that range, so the result is the kind of name such a person was likely to have.

Packs differ in what their sources hold, and the picker says so. Some have full counts by year of birth; some only top lists; some are drawn from names of notable people, which lean towards men and the famous, and are labelled that way. Real names are presented as real names, by language and era, never labelled by a whole ethnicity.

Historical fiction gets its own packs. Medieval names by region and century come with the bynames people actually used before inherited surnames (a patronymic, a place, a trade or a nickname), and ancient Rome gets its three-part names. A full name is built in the period’s own pattern, and you can reroll each part.

• Common names only, or any name in the data
• First names, family names or full names
• Medieval packs keep native spellings beside the English ones
• Start an invented style from a pack, so names sound Norse without being real Norse names

Invented names, in a style you set

Not every cast lives on Earth. For invented peoples, a naming style learns from example names you give it and makes new ones in the same sound, with optional rules for length, favoured endings, letters to avoid and how a full name is put together. The live preview updates as you type, which is the quickest way to tune a style until it sounds right.

Real and invented can work together. “Start from a pack” copies a few hundred real names into an invented style’s examples, so the generator makes new names that sound like Old Norse, medieval Japan or 1920s France without drawing any actual names. It is a quick route to a culture that feels grounded without being a copy of a real one.

Neither mode uses the AI. Invented names are made in your browser; real names are drawn on our server from the packs, which never leave it. Rerolls cost nothing either way.

Checking the whole cast

The most common naming problem in a manuscript isn’t a bad name. It is two good names that are too alike. Readers recognise names by first letter and overall shape, so Marian and Miriam, or Tom, Tim and Tam, will blur on a fast read even though each name is fine on its own.

Every idea the dice show is checked against the names and aliases already in your bible, with any warning beside it: already used, close to another name, the same first letter as several of the cast, or the same first syllable or ending as someone. The warnings never block a choice. Check names on the Bible page runs the same checks over your whole existing cast and lists the clusters, each linked to its entry.

The cast check also flags the names AI models overuse, like Elara, Kael, Lyra and Thorne. They are banned by default when the AI suggests names, and the check shows you any already in your book.

Naming the minor characters quickly

A novel can have dozens of people who appear once: the clerk, the nurse on the night shift, the neighbour who finds the body. Each still needs a name, and each name is a small chance to slip, by reusing a first letter, by picking another name from your own generation, or by stalling the draft while you hunt for one.

This is where the dice earn their keep. Set the project’s default style to a pack and decade that fit your setting, and every new entry offers names that belong there, with any clash already marked. Pick one in a second and keep writing. Because each minor character gets a bible entry, the clerk named in chapter three is still findable, with the same spelling, when she turns out to matter in chapter twenty-six.

Where you’ll find it

The generator lives inside the studio rather than as a public tool on this site, so there is nothing to try on this page without signing in. In a project, the dice sit beside the name field on every entry page and in the bible’s new-entry dialog, and name ideas appear under the name field when you add someone in Foundations.

A character’s name is just their name, with aliases for nicknames, titles and the names other people call them. When you change one, Rename on the entry page changes it everywhere the text writes it, with a preview and undo.