Gnome Name Generator

A Swiss alchemist invented the gnome

Elves, dwarves and trolls have no author. They come out of old Germanic and Norse tradition, and by the time anybody wrote them down they had been around for centuries.

The gnome is different. The gnome has a date and a creator.

Paracelsus was a Swiss physician and alchemist who died in 1541. In a book published after his death, in 1566, he sorted the spirits of the world into four kinds, one for each element. Undines for water. Sylphs for air. Salamanders for fire. And for earth, gnomi.

He appears to have made the word up. The best guess is that he was reaching for Greek, for something meaning earth-dweller, and dropped a letter on the way. The Oxford English Dictionary, with beautiful bluntness, calls the missing letter a blunder.

So the gnome may well be named after a spelling mistake, which is the most gnome thing that has ever happened.

His gnomes were not funny, either. They stood about eighteen inches tall, they were shy of people, and they moved through solid rock the way a fish moves through water. Quiet, secretive, a little unsettling. The garden ornament came later. The goggled tinkerer with an exploding invention came much later than that.

Why gnome names make you smile

Read a few from the list. Slimboog. Hunsnep. Odobblal. Thakleebeess.

Something happens in your face. Why?

Chris Westbury and his colleagues at the University of Alberta went after this properly. They gave people made-up words and asked how funny each one was. Then they showed that you can predict the answer just from the letters. Words built out of improbable letter combinations get rated as funnier than words built out of ordinary ones. Their best performing participant picked the funnier of two nonsense words correctly ninety two percent of the time.

The idea underneath it is old. Humour comes from a violated expectation. Your brain is quietly predicting the next letter, and a word that keeps betraying the prediction keeps producing tiny surprises.

They point out that Dr. Seuss had been doing this by instinct for decades. A word like yuzz-a-ma-tuzz is funny in large part because z is a letter English almost never uses.

Now go back to the list. Doubled letters everywhere: bb, ee, oo. Consonants that have no business standing next to each other: sn, thr, cl. Every one of those is a small betrayal of what your eye was expecting, and if you want the funniest names in any batch, those improbable clusters are exactly what to look for.

A gnome name is engineered to be improbable. That is the entire craft.

Taking a silly name apart

Take Slimboog.

The first half is a real English word. Slim. You know where you are. Your brain settles.

The second half is not a word at all, and it ends on a doubled o followed by a g, which is a combination English hardly ever produces.

That is the recipe, and it is a balance. Half familiar, half nonsense. Pure gibberish is not funny, it is just noise, and the researchers say so themselves. You need the familiar half so the reader has something to be surprised away from.

Now put Clanzainoort next to it. Longer. Stranger. Funnier on the page, and considerably harder to say twice.

Which gives you a practical rule. The long absurd ones are for the gnome who appears in one scene and gets a laugh. The short, punchy ones like Thekmit are for the gnome who has to hold a conversation for six chapters. Your reader has to say that name in their head every time, and comedy does not survive repetition.

When silly stops being funny

The name that is only a joke. If the funniest thing about your gnome is his name, you have a punchline, not a character. The name should be the door, not the room.

Too long to speak. Say it out loud four times, the way a player at your table will have to. If your tongue gives up, so will they, and within a session he will be called Bob.

Everybody funny means nobody funny. If all six gnomes have absurd names, the absurdity flattens into background noise. Give one of them a plain, short, slightly disappointing name and watch him become the most interesting one in the room.

The sinister gnome. Worth saying plainly: if you want the quiet, unnerving creature Paracelsus actually described, this list will fight you the whole way. Those names are built for comedy. You would be better off building one by hand, keeping it short, and letting it be almost ordinary.

Where these names come from

The names come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, engineered to be improbable enough to raise a smile. One is drawn at random each time. It runs entirely on your own device. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about gnomes

Are gnomes just small dwarves?

No, and they are not even related. Dwarves come out of old Norse and Germanic tradition and were being written about centuries before anybody used the word gnome. The gnome was invented in the sixteenth century by one man, as an earth spirit in a system of elemental beings. They ended up sharing a mountain in fantasy purely by convenience.

Why are gnome names so long?

Length gives the improbability room to work. A short word has only a couple of chances to surprise you. A long one keeps setting up expectations and knocking them down, syllable after syllable, and each little collapse is what you are smiling at.

Which of these are female gnome names?

The list is not split. Gnome naming in most settings is not gendered so much as it is playful. If you want one to read as feminine, take a name that ends on a vowel rather than one of those hard stops, or simply hand it to the character and let her keep it.

Is a garden gnome the same gnome?

Distantly. The little bearded figure in the flowerbed is a nineteenth century descendant of the earth spirit, by way of German folklore and a lot of painted terracotta. Paracelsus would probably not recognise him, and would certainly not approve of the fishing rod.

Can a gnome ever be sinister rather than silly?

Yes, and that was the original. The creature Paracelsus described was quiet, shy and a little eerie, not comic at all. To get there, avoid the improbable comic sounds, keep the name short and almost ordinary, and let the unease come from how plain it is.

References

1. Westbury, C., Shaoul, C., Moroschan, G. and Ramscar, M. (2016). Telling the world's least funny jokes: On the quantification of humor as entropy. Journal of Memory and Language, 86, 141 to 156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.09.001
2. A Scientific Theory of Humor. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-scientific-theory-of-humor/
3. Elemental. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elemental
4. Paracelsus (1566). Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris et de caeteris spiritibus.