Gangster Name Generator

What the gangster name generator does

You want a gangster name. For a track, a tag, a gamertag, a character, a bit.

This gives you one. Pull a batch and read down until one of them makes you laugh in the right way.

Then stay, because there is something buried in these names that is a genuine curiosity of the English language, there are linguists who have written papers about it, and the man responsible died in 2019 without most people noticing.

How to use it

Ask for plenty, this being a numbers game, and press Generate. Copy takes the set with you.

English does not put things in the middle of words. This does.

Look at Mo' Bizzle. Look at Straight Dizzle.

Something has been shoved into the middle of those words, and English is not supposed to be able to do that.

Here is the thing almost nobody knows about their own language. English adds bits to the front of words all day long. Un-, re-, pre-, anti-. And it adds bits to the back constantly. -ing, -ness, -ly, -ed. Prefixes and suffixes, thousands of them, no problem.

Putting something in the middle is called an infix. And English essentially does not have them.

Not "has few". Has basically none. Plenty of languages infix happily. English gets to the middle of a word and stops.

There are two exceptions worth the name. One is swearing. Abso-bloody-lutely. Fan-flipping-tastic. Linguists call it expletive infixation and there is a serious literature on it going back decades, because it turns out to be one of the few windows into how English speakers unconsciously carve words into rhythmic chunks.

And the other one is this. The iz.

That is the company it keeps. Swearing, and Snoop Dogg. Those are English's two productive infixes.

And now the part that makes it a real thing rather than a novelty. It has rules. You know them. You were never taught them.

Take dream. It becomes dr-iz-eam. It does not become d-iz-ream. Every English speaker knows which one is right and nobody can say why.

The answer is that the iz goes in after the consonants that open the syllable and before the vowel. Not after the first letter. After the first sound cluster. And on longer words it hunts down the stressed syllable and lands there: you get eff-iz-ect, not iz-effect, because the stress is on the second half.

There is a linguistics paper called Introducing English (IZ)-Infixation: Snoop Dogg and bey(IZ)ond, and it is exactly what it sounds like: somebody sat down and worked out the phonological rules of shizzle, in the same framework you would use for any other language, and they are not simple, and native speakers follow them perfectly without ever having heard of them.

Which is the same thing that is true of the swearing one. Nobody teaches you that it is abso-bloody-lutely and not ab-bloody-solutely. You just know.

So a silly name off a list is sitting on top of one of the two places in the entire English language where speakers will let you break into the middle of a word. That is not nothing.

The man who put it on a record

Almost everyone credits Snoop Dogg. Snoop did not do it first, and he has never claimed he did.

On the 22nd of February, 1981, a Philadelphia musician called Frankie Smith released a song called Double Dutch Bus.

Frankie Smith was forty one. He had gone to college for elementary education with a music minor. He had spent the seventies writing for other people, for the O'Jays and the Spinners, which is a good career and not a famous one. He had already tried a song called Double Dutch back in 1972, under the name Franklin Franklin, and nothing happened.

Then he watched girls playing double dutch in the street, noticed the game was having a moment again, and went back to it.

The record is built on the iz. The chorus contains the line that is, as far as anybody can trace, the first time this appeared on a record at all: Wizze izzare plizzayin dizzouble dizzutch. We are playing double dutch.

It went to number one on the soul chart and sat there for four weeks.

Everything downstream comes from that record. Snoop built a whole persona on it, D-O-Double Gizzle, a television show called Doggy Fizzle Televizzle, an entire decade of the word shizzle. Missy Elliott sampled the song directly. Kanye used the infix. For a stretch in the early 2000s you could not buy a packet of crisps without an advert doing it at you.

Now here is how it ends.

Frankie Smith said his label never paid him his royalties.

And he died in Philadelphia, on the 8th of March 2019, at seventy nine. The plainest way anybody has put it is the way Wikipedia puts it: his death was not widely reported.

A man wrote a number one record, gave English one of its two working infixes, handed a generation of rappers their signature move, said he never saw the money, and died more or less unnoticed in the city he was born in.

You are about three clicks from a name with his fingerprints on it.

It was already old when he found it

And Frankie Smith did not invent it either. He put it on a record, which is different.

The iz was already circulating. It sits in a family of coded speech used by hustlers and pimps in the seventies, the kind of talk that exists specifically so that the people around you cannot follow it. A cant. A language with a door on it.

And it goes back further than that. Duke University's library has letters, decades older, from people writing to each other in the same code. Insert iz after the first consonant. If the word starts with a vowel, stick biz on the front. The librarians who found them connected it to what carnival workers used to speak, a trade argot for saying things in front of customers who were not supposed to understand.

So follow the chain. Carnival workers hiding a sentence from a mark. Hustlers hiding a sentence from a cop. A funk record in 1981. A rapper in 1993. A crisp advert in 2003. A name generator in front of you now.

Every one of those steps is the same trick doing a completely different job. It starts as a lock. It ends as a joke. And the mechanism never changes at all: break the word open at the stressed syllable and put something in the hole.

That is what happens to secret languages when they work too well. Somebody hears it, likes the sound, and the secret becomes a style. Which is a kind of theft and also the only reason any of it survived to be written down.

Taking a gangster name apart

Big Steez. Young Tilt. Slim Parlay. Boss Gravy. Eazy Grillz.

Every one is two slots, and they are doing completely different jobs.

The first slot is a title. Big, Lil, Young, Slim, Boss, Duke, Grandaddy, Busta, Foxxy, Eazy, Straight, Mo'. It is not describing you. It is placing you. More on this below, because it is the strangest part.

The second slot is the content. And this is where the whole thing lives, because these words are not English, or rather, they are English that has been through something.

Steez is style and ease, welded together. It is a portmanteau and it means the thing you cannot get by trying.

Chedda is cheese is money, a metaphor two steps deep, and nobody involved is thinking about dairy.

Grillz is a mouth full of jewellery, from grille, from the front of a car.

Bizzle and Dizzle are the infix from three sections ago, doing its work.

Parlay is a bet rolled into the next bet, borrowed out of gambling into meaning turn a small thing into a large thing.

So the second slot is a compressed dictionary of somewhere. Every word in it has been carried out of one context and repurposed, and the process is exactly what English has done to itself for a thousand years, running at speed, in public, in the last forty.

The name is a title plus a piece of live vocabulary. That is the formula, and it is why these read as funny rather than as nonsense. Nonsense would be two invented words. This is a real structure with real slang in it.

Why Big and Lil mean the same thing

Here is the thing that should not work and does.

Big and Lil are opposites. They are also the same word.

Not similar. The same, functionally. Both of them mean roughly: this is a name, take it seriously, there is a person behind it. Neither of them is a description.

Nobody hears Lil and thinks small. Nobody hears Big and checks. They have stopped being adjectives and become something closer to a prefix that says a name is coming, the way Sir or Doctor does, except with none of the meaning left.

You can watch the meaning drain out of a word in real time here. Lil started as something a listener could parse. Now it is decorative. It has been used enough times, by enough people, that it has been sanded down into a signal rather than a statement. Which is precisely what happened to Mister, which used to be master, and to Madam, which used to be my lady, and to every honorific that has ever existed anywhere.

Same with Young. It does not mean young. It means: I am claiming a name.

So the first slot of these names is an honorific in the middle of being born. Not a joke about size. A word that has almost finished the journey from meaning something to meaning here comes a name, and it is doing that in front of us, in one generation, which is fast. Mister took about four hundred years.

You are looking at a title system in its infancy, and it is being built out of adjectives that have had their adjective removed.

Where these came from

Nothing clever.

Every item here was chosen by hand, built on the two slot structure described above. Press Generate and the results are drawn at random, and you will not see the same one twice in a batch.

This all runs locally in your browser, with nothing transmitted.

Making one that works

Say it out loud. These are made to be said, not read. A gangster name that only works on a page is not a gangster name, it is a username. The rhythm is the entire product.

Two beats beats three. The good ones are short and land like a punch. Big Steez. Boss Gravy. Once you are past three syllables the thing sags, which is the same reason nobody has ever had a four word nickname that stuck.

Do not infix at random. If you are building your own, put the iz where your ear wants it, which will be after the opening consonants and before the vowel of the stressed syllable. Your ear already knows. Overthinking it produces the version that sounds wrong and you will not be able to explain why.

The title slot is free, the content slot is not. Any of Big, Lil, Young, Boss, Slim will attach to anything. It is the second word that decides whether the name is any good, and the second word has to be a real piece of vocabulary rather than a noise.

Know what era you are in. Slang has a shelf life measured in a few years. A name built out of the vocabulary of one decade tells a listener exactly which decade, instantly, which is a gift if that is what you wanted and a problem if it is not.

Questions people ask

Did Snoop Dogg invent shizzle?

No, and he has not claimed to. Frankie Smith put the iz on a record in 1981 with Double Dutch Bus and took it to number one. Snoop made it famous fifteen years later. And Frankie Smith did not invent it either, he picked it up from coded speech that was already going around.

What is an infix?

Something inserted into the middle of a word rather than stuck on the front or the back. English barely has any. There is the swearing one, as in abso-bloody-lutely, and there is iz. That is close to the whole list.

Are there rules for where the iz goes?

Yes, and you already follow them. It lands after the consonants that open the stressed syllable and before its vowel, which is why dream becomes dr-iz-eam and never d-iz-ream. Nobody teaches this. There is a published linguistics paper working out the details.

Are these mafia names?

No, and it is worth saying since the search term is ambiguous. These are built on hip hop naming, which is a completely separate tradition with its own structure. Prohibition-era mob nicknames worked differently and most of the famous ones were invented by newspapers rather than by anybody in the mob.

Why do so many rappers use Lil?

Because it stopped meaning small. It is an honorific now, in the same category as Mister or Sir, just much younger and not finished yet. Big does exactly the same job, which is why a word and its opposite can sit in the same slot and nobody blinks.

References

1. Viau, J. Introducing English (IZ)-Infixation: Snoop Dogg and bey(IZ)ond. https://www.academia.edu/8232137/Introducing_English_IZ_Infixation_Snoop_Dogg_and_bey_IZ_ond
2. Double Dutch Bus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Dutch_Bus
3. Frankie Smith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankie_Smith
4. Tizhe Lizanguage bizof Lizovers: Carny Latin Reincarnated. The Devil's Tale, Rubenstein Library, Duke University. https://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2014/12/17/tizhe-lizanguage-bizof-lizovers-carny-latin-reincarnated/
5. -izzle. Wiktionary. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-izzle