Troll Name Generator

There are three different trolls

The word is Old Norse, and the oldest troll is the folklore one. Big, slow, lives under a rock or beside a bridge, and turns to stone when the sun comes up. That is the troll Tolkien put in The Hobbit, and he did not have to invent a thing to do it. He just used what was already there.

The second troll is the one everybody who has rolled dice knows. You cut it down and it gets back up. Its wounds close. Only fire will finish it.

Almost everyone assumes that troll is ancient too. It is not. It is younger than the ballpoint pen.

The third troll is the one this list belongs to. Tribal, spiritual, organised into clans, with a naming grammar of its own. It comes out of modern games rather than out of any folk tradition, and it is by far the most interesting of the three to name.

The troll that grows back was invented in 1953

Poul Anderson published a story called Three Hearts and Three Lions, serialised in 1953 and expanded into a novel in 1961. Late in the book the heroes get cornered by a troll in a tunnel. It is lanky, rubbery skinned, and green. They kill it. It reassembles itself and comes back. They only survive because somebody happens to hit it with a torch.

The regeneration was Anderson's own idea. So was the fire.

Gary Gygax read that book, cited it directly when he wrote up the troll for his wargame in 1971, and later put Anderson's novel on the famous reading list at the back of the Dungeon Master's Guide. From there it went into every fantasy game that copied the first one, which is all of them.

So the single most famous fact about trolls, the thing every player at the table knows to reach for the torch, is not folklore at all. It is seventy years old and it has an author.

Which is worth remembering when somebody tells you what trolls are "supposed" to be like.

What these names are made of

Look at them. Zulmara. Ajin. Hakalai. Zoti. Lakjin.

Nothing Norse about any of it. No stone, no bridge, no consonant pile.

Two things are going on, and both are deliberate.

The first is that these names stay open. They end on a vowel far more often than on anything else, usually an a or an i. Say Zulmara and then say an orc name like Bugdurash. The orc name slams a door. The troll name walks out of the room singing. That single difference is why trolls read as a culture and orcs read as a mob.

The second is the letter Z. More names here start with Z than with any other letter, and Z is one of the rarest letters in English. Put a rare letter at the front and keep everything after it soft and singable, and you get a word that feels foreign without ever feeling harsh. That is a genuinely clever piece of design.

Then there is the part you probably noticed without noticing. Ajin. Lakjin. Wonjin. Rujin. The same ending, over and over. Type a fragment like jin into a search and you pull out an entire family of names at once, which is the clue to how the whole set was built.

Naming a whole tribe, not one troll

Here is the technique, and it is the most useful thing on this page.

Pick one prefix. Pick one suffix. Then vary the middle.

That is what is happening in this list. A repeated opening like Zul, a repeated ending like -jin, and a hundred different things in between. Your reader will feel the relationship between those characters immediately, without you writing a single line about clans or bloodlines. It reads as a language, because that is how languages actually behave.

It works for anything. A pirate crew, a guild, a family, a village. Two fixed points and a free middle.

Three things to avoid.

Do not give every troll the affix. If all of them are -jin, it stops being a marker and becomes wallpaper. Some of them should sit outside the pattern, and those are the ones your reader will decide are important.

Go easy on apostrophes. You will notice there are none in this list. The video game names that shaped this convention are full of them, and each one makes a reader stop and work out where the break falls. Use one, for one character, and only if the pause is worth it.

Do not let them rhyme. A shared ending is a family. A shared rhythm is a chorus line. Vary the syllable count.

A note on these troll names

The names come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, built as a set that hangs together like a clan rather than a pile of unrelated words. One is drawn at random each time. Everything happens on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about trolls

Do trolls really turn to stone in sunlight?

In Scandinavian folklore, yes, and that is where Tolkien got it. In tabletop games, no, because those trolls descend from Poul Anderson's regenerating one instead. Two different creatures wearing the same name. Decide which one is in your story before somebody lights a torch.

Does the internet troll come from this troll?

Not originally, no. The verb is generally traced back to fishing, where trolling means dragging a baited line slowly through the water to see what bites. That is a rather good description of what the person in your replies is doing. The monster almost certainly helped the word stick, but it did not start it.

Are trolls and ogres the same?

They have been used interchangeably for centuries, and in a few old glossaries the words gloss each other. Modern fantasy separated them, gave the ogre bulk and stupidity and the troll regeneration, and now they are firmly two things.

Which of these are female troll names?

The list is not split. In the settings these names come from, the affixes mark clan rather than sex. If you want one to read as feminine, the names ending in a are the softer ones to an English speaking ear.

Why do these names sound like they belong together?

Because they are built from shared prefixes and suffixes with varied middles, which is how a real language signals family and clan. That repeated structure is what makes the whole set feel like one people rather than a collection of unrelated names.

References

1. Anderson, Poul. Three Hearts and Three Lions. Serialised 1953, published in book form 1961.
2. Advanced Readings in D&D: Poul Anderson. Reactor. https://www.tor.com/2013/06/17/advanced-readings-in-dad-poul-anderson/
3. Adventures in Fiction: Poul Anderson. Goodman Games. https://goodman-games.com/blog/2022/11/26/adventures-in-fiction-poul-anderson/