Wizard Name Generator

Four words, four different accusations

Wizard. Sorcerer. Warlock. Witch.

Everybody treats these as flavours of the same thing, differing mainly in hat. They are not. Each one is a separate accusation, made by different people, at different times, about a different offence. Pull them apart and you get four completely distinct ideas of what is wrong with a person who knows too much.

Wizard means wise. That is all it means. It comes from Middle English, from the ordinary word wise, and for a long while it just meant a sage, a philosopher, a learned man. The magic came later.

Sorcerer comes through French from a Latin word for a man who casts lots. Sors is a lot, a share, a fate. A sorcerer was originally somebody who told you what was going to happen by drawing lots. Not a caster of fireballs. A caster of dice.

Witch is the old English craft word, and it applied to men and women alike before it narrowed.

Warlock is the strangest of the four, and it does not belong in this list at all.

The suffix that gives the wizard away

Go back to wizard, because there is something hiding in it.

Middle English built the word out of two pieces. The first is wis, which is wise. The second is the suffix -ard.

Now think about the other words English built with that suffix.

Drunkard. Coward. Dullard. Sluggard. Laggard.

The -ard ending is not neutral. It marks a person who is a thing to excess, and it very rarely marks them kindly. A drunkard is not somebody who drinks. He is somebody who drinks too much.

So a wizard is not simply a wise man. A wizard is a man who is wise too much. The word has an eyebrow raised in it.

That is the whole medieval attitude to learning in one suffix. Knowledge is fine, up to a point, and past that point we have a word for you.

Warlock is not a magic word

Warlock comes from Old English wǣrloga. It is built from wǣr, meaning a covenant or a promise, and loga, meaning a liar.

An oath-breaker. A traitor. Somebody who gave you their word and then did not keep it.

There is no magic in it anywhere. Around the year 1000 the word gets applied to the devil, who is the oath-breaker above all others, and from there it drifts. In Scots it comes to mean a male witch, on the reasoning that a man who deals with the devil has broken the promises he made at his baptism.

So the word never described what he could do. It described what he did to you. Every other word in this family is about knowledge. That one is about betrayal.

It is worth knowing that people who practise modern witchcraft generally do not use the word for this exact reason, and that some use it only for somebody expelled for breaking an oath, which is the original meaning arriving back home after a thousand years.

You will sometimes read that warlock comes from a Norse phrase meaning caller of spirits. It is a much nicer story. The dictionaries do not accept it.

How four synonyms became four character classes

Here is where all of this becomes surprisingly practical.

When tabletop games needed several different kinds of magic-user, they reached for the words English already had. And because those words carried four different accusations, the classes built on top of them ended up with four different mechanics, and nobody planned it.

The wizard studies. He is wise to excess, so he has books, and his power is what he has read.

The sorcerer does not study. His power is in his blood, given rather than earned, and that is what a caster of lots always was. Somebody fate happened to.

The warlock has a patron. He made a deal. Of course he did. The word means he made a promise, and the entire question hanging over him is whether he will keep it.

Read the words, and the classes are already there. The oldest layer of English is quietly writing the rulebook. It is the same trick the names in that game pull, where the whole world is implied by one possessive apostrophe.

Naming one

Decide which accusation you want before you pick a sound.

If your figure is a scholar, give them a name with weight and Latin in it. Something that sounds like it belongs on a spine of a book. The wisdom is the point, and the danger is that there is too much of it.

If your figure has power they never worked for, give them something musical and slightly unearned. The sorcerer did not build this. It arrived.

If your figure has made a bargain, the name should sound like it belongs to somebody else. Borrowed. Slightly ill-fitting. That is the whole tragedy of the word.

And a plain practical note. A name for somebody who will be addressed by other characters wants a strong first syllable and a soft landing. It is going to be said in a hurry, usually by somebody who needs help.

About the list

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

Questions people ask about wizards

What is the difference between a wizard and a warlock?

Historically, everything. Wizard is built from the word wise, and originally described a sage. Warlock comes from an Old English word meaning oath-breaker and had nothing to do with magic. One word accuses you of knowing too much. The other accuses you of lying.

What does sorcerer actually mean?

One who casts lots. It traces back to the Latin sors, a lot or a share of fate. The original sorcerer was closer to a fortune teller than a battle mage, which is why the modern class so often has power it never asked for.

Is wizard really an insult?

It carries a faint one. The -ard suffix in English tends to mark excess, as in drunkard, coward and dullard. A wizard is wise in the way a drunkard is thirsty.

Is there a female word for wizard?

English never really settled one, which is part of why witch ended up doing so much work. The old craft word applied to both men and women before it narrowed onto women alone.

What about mage and magician?

Both go back to the magi, the priestly caste of ancient Persia. So that word does not accuse anybody of anything. It simply says: this person belongs to a foreign priesthood, and we do not know what they do in there.

References

1. Warlock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlock
2. Warlock. Wiktionary. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/warlock
3. Wizard. Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/wizard