Human Name Generator

Why anybody has two names at all

In Anglo-Saxon England people had one name. Just the one. In a village of ninety people that is plenty.

Then the villages grew, and the arithmetic broke.

Here is the number that explains the whole of European naming. Medieval England was working with roughly six hundred given names. It eventually produced something like twenty thousand surnames.

Think about what that ratio means. There were never enough first names. There were four Johns in the street, and no way to tell anybody which one you meant. So people started hanging a second word on each John, and the second word was whatever was most obvious about him.

That extra word was called a byname, or a to-name. It was not a family name. It was a description, invented by the neighbours, and it died with the man who carried it.

Everything that follows, every Smith and Hill and Johnson on earth, grew out of the problem of too many Johns.

The four ways a surname is born

Look at the bynames people actually reached for and there are only four kinds. Every surname you have ever met is one of these, or an argument about which.

What he did. Smith. Baker. Taylor. Cooper, who made barrels. Fletcher, who made arrows. These arrived first in towns, because a town is where two men called John do different work.

Where he lived. Hill. Green, meaning the village green. Brooks, Woods, Sutton, Burton. Some name a whole town and some name the specific patch of ground outside a specific door. In the older records they still carry the little preposition, and you can watch it fall off over a century.

Whose son he was. Johnson. Richardson. Jackson. The north of England preferred to add son. The south and middle preferred to add an s, so Johns rather than Johnson. Scotland used Mac, Ireland used O, and Wales kept the whole system alive so thoroughly that Welsh surnames changed with every single generation.

What he looked like. Brown. Short. Long. Redhead. Moody. Sharp. These are the nicknames, and they are the cruellest and the most human of the four.

If that last category sounds familiar, it is exactly the machinery behind dwarf names, where the second name is still a byname earned from a trade or a body part rather than inherited from a father.

The year the second name stopped changing

A byname is not a surname. A byname describes you. A surname describes your grandfather.

The switch is one of the quiet revolutions in European life, and you can very nearly date it.

Across central and western Europe, second names began to harden into fixed, inherited things from the twelfth century onward. In England, the first legal recognition of a hereditary surname comes in 1267, and it is de Cantebrigg, meaning of Canterbury. Somebody's grandfather had come from Canterbury, and the family kept saying so long after everybody had stopped caring.

The habit spread from the top. Landowners first, then merchants and townspeople, then everybody else. By 1400 roughly three quarters of the English population carried an inherited family name. By about 1450 it was essentially done.

And notice what had to happen for that. The name had to stop being true. A man called Smith who had never touched an anvil. A Hill who lived in a valley. The moment a surname became hereditary was the moment it became a fossil, and it has been carrying information about a dead ancestor ever since.

There is a lovely detail from the transition period. A married woman might go by her own surname or by her husband's with wyf stuck on the end. Mary Walker, wife of Henry Field, was Mary Fieldwyf.

The lie hiding inside a status surname

Somewhere out there is a family called King. They are not descended from a king.

Status surnames are the great trap of amateur genealogy. King, Bishop, Abbot, Knight, Cardinal. Almost nobody with those names descends from a person who held the office, for the obvious reason that kings and bishops were thin on the ground and rarely available for reproduction.

What the names usually mean is one of three things. The man served somebody who held the office. Or he played the part in a village feast or a mystery play, and it stuck, the way nicknames do. Or, most often, the neighbours were being funny.

Because these names are nicknames, and nicknames are ironic. A man called Short may well have been enormous. Scholars who work on this point it out constantly and it is almost never believed.

Which is the thing worth taking away. The surname does not record the truth about an ancestor. It records what the people around him found funny enough to keep saying.

Why invented human names still feel real

Now look at the names above with all that in your head.

The ones that feel like they belong to a person are the ones obeying the four rules. A given name that sounds like a given name, and a second name that is a place, a trade, a father or a nickname. Your ear is checking, without being asked, whether the surname is doing a job.

This is the whole reason human names are the hardest names in fantasy. An elf name only has to sound beautiful, because you have no idea what elvish grammar is. A human name has to survive a reader who has spent their entire life among human names and knows, instantly, when one is wrong.

So if you are building one by hand, do not invent a surname. Choose a job, a landscape feature, a father or an insult, and let it be transparent. Nobody has ever read Marvin Paddley and stopped to ask what Paddley means. They just believe it, because it behaves like a place.

And if you want a name that quietly tells the reader something, remember that a surname is a fossil. Give a scheming courtier the surname Field and you have said something about his grandfather that he would rather you did not know.

About the names above

The names come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, and one is drawn at random each time. It runs on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about human names

Why did surnames start?

Because there were too few given names. Medieval England ran on a few hundred first names and needed a way to separate the many people sharing them, so it began attaching descriptions, and those descriptions eventually became inherited.

When did surnames become hereditary?

They started hardening from the twelfth century. England's first legally recognised hereditary surname dates to 1267. By 1400 most of the population had one, and the process was complete around 1450. Wales carried on changing the name every generation for far longer.

Does a surname really tell you what an ancestor did?

Sometimes, and less often than people hope. Occupational names like Smith are reliable enough. Status names like King and Knight are usually nicknames or references to service, not descent. And any nickname surname may well be sarcastic.

How do I make an invented human name sound real?

Make the surname do a job. Point it at a place, a trade, a father or a physical feature. Readers do not need to recognise the word. They need to feel that the word is the kind of word that becomes a surname.

Should the given name or the surname carry the character?

The given name is chosen by a parent, so it carries hope. The surname is inherited, so it carries history. If you want a character who is at odds with where they came from, put the tension between the two halves and never mention it.

References

1. England Surname Origins. International Institute, FamilySearch. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/England_Surname_Origins_(National_Institute)
2. Name: Family names. Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/name/Family-names
3. Classifying surnames. Cornish Studies Resources. https://bernarddeacon.com/cornish-surnames/classifying-surnames/