Latin Name Generator

What the Latin name generator does

You are after a Roman name. For a novel, a game, a Latin class, or a legion you invented.

This gives you Roman names. Reel off a batch and browse it.

Hang on a moment, because Roman names are not a version of our names with different spelling. The whole idea underneath them is different, and the difference is genuinely strange.

How to use it

Pick a number and press Generate for a new set each time. Copy takes them with you.

Rome ran on about eighteen first names

Start here, because everything else follows from it.

The Romans used roughly eighteen first names. In total. For the whole civilisation.

Not eighteen popular ones. Not eighteen in a given decade. Eighteen, more or less, was the supply. Gaius. Lucius. Marcus. Publius. Quintus. Titus. Aulus. Sextus. Decimus. Gnaeus. Servius. Tiberius. And a short tail of others that were mostly the property of specific families.

Read the list on this page. Marcus, Lucius, Gaius, Titus, Sextus, Aulus, over and over. That is not a shortage of imagination on our part. That is Rome.

And the consequence is the thing worth sitting with. A first name that eighteen thousand men share is not identifying anybody. It is barely doing a job at all.

The Romans knew this perfectly well, and you can see them knowing it, because they stopped bothering to write them out. In inscriptions, on tombs, in letters, a praenomen gets abbreviated to a single letter. M. is Marcus. L. is Lucius. T. is Titus. Q. is Quintus. Nobody expanded them because nobody needed to. The whole set fit in everyone's head, and a letter was enough.

My favourite of these is C., which is Gaius. Not G. C. It looks like an error and it is a fossil: in the old Latin alphabet, before G existed as a separate letter, C did the job of both sounds. The alphabet moved on. The abbreviation never did, because it was already carved into too much stone.

So the Roman first name is the opposite of ours. Ours is the personal bit, the one your parents agonised over. Theirs was a formality so predictable it got shortened to an initial and left there for a thousand years.

Every daughter of the Julii was called Julia

Now the part that stops people.

Roman women did not get a first name at all.

Not a limited choice. Not a smaller list. None. By the Republic, a daughter was simply called by the feminine form of her father's clan name, and that was the entire name.

If your father was a Julius, you were Julia. If he was a Cornelius, you were Cornelia. If he was a Claudius, Claudia. There was no decision to make. Nobody chose it. It was arithmetic performed on your father.

And if he had two daughters?

They were both called Julia.

Julius Caesar had two sisters. Their names were Julia Major and Julia Minor. Julia the elder and Julia the younger. That is not a nickname the historians gave them. That is what they were called.

Mark Antony had two daughters. Antonia Major and Antonia Minor. One of them became Nero's grandmother and the other became the emperor Claudius's mother, and between them they are load-bearing walls in the entire first century, and their names were the same name with a size label on it.

Three daughters or more and you gave up on adjectives and went to numbers. Claudia Tertia. Cornelia Quinta, the fifth daughter of a Cornelius. The fifth one. That is her name.

Sit with the shape of it. A Roman man's first name was almost useless because eighteen thousand men shared it. A Roman woman's name was not even trying. It reported which family owned her, in the feminine, and the only additional information available was her position in the birth order.

There is a detail that puts a point on this, and it is oddly beautiful, which makes it worse. At some Roman weddings the bride said a formula to accept her husband: Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia. Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia.

Gaius is the most ordinary man's name in Rome. Gaia is its feminine. So the one moment in a Roman woman's life when she got to say her own first name out loud, it was not hers. It was the feminine of the generic man, spoken to a man who was not called Gaius either.

And why do we know so little about any of it? Because, as the historians of Roman naming keep having to point out, the sources were written by men, about war and politics, which they understood to be men's business. The women are in there. Their names mostly are not.

The greatest orator in history was called Chickpea

So if the first name is useless and the clan name is shared by thousands, where does an actual Roman identity come from?

The third name. The cognomen. And the cognomen started life as an insult.

It was a nickname, and originally a personal one, pinned on one specific person for something about them. And the Romans were not gentle about it.

Scaevola means Lefty. Balbus means the one who stutters. Cursor means the runner. Rufus is the red-haired one. Crassus is fat. Naso is nose, and it belonged to the poet we call Ovid, so one of the greatest writers in Latin is formally Big Nose.

And then the best one.

Cicero means chickpea. The story is that an ancestor had a wart on his nose shaped like one. That is the origin of the name of the man who is, more or less, the reason we can read Latin prose at all.

He was told to change it. When he went into public life his friends put it to him plainly: you cannot walk into the Senate called Chickpea. Pick something with some dignity.

He refused. He said he would make Cicero more famous than the grandest names in Rome.

He was right, and it is not close. Two thousand years later the word means him, and the families with the dignified names are footnotes in his letters.

And there is a lovely trap in the system, which is that the joke wore off. Once a cognomen got inherited, it stopped describing anybody. A Roman named Rufus in the late Republic was not red-haired. Some ancestor was. The insult calcified into a surname, and everyone forgot it had ever been a comment.

Which means the Roman name did the opposite of what it was for. The bit designed to be personal became a formality. The bit designed to be a formality was so useless it fell away. And the bit that was originally somebody being rude about a wart became the family name, and then became history.

Taking a Roman name apart

Take Gaius Julius Caesar, because everybody already half knows it and almost nobody has looked at it.

Gaius is the praenomen. One of the eighteen. It tells you nothing.

Julius is the nomen, the clan name. He is of the gens Julia, an old patrician house. This is the real name, and it is shared by every single member of the clan, including all those Julias.

Caesar is the cognomen, marking his branch of the Julii. Nobody is quite sure what it originally meant, and one of the old suggestions is that it referred to a full head of hair, which would be a decent joke on a man who spent his later years combing what was left of his forward.

So the famous name is: generic, clan, nickname. In that order. Smallest information to largest.

Now go the other way and look at the full formal version of a Roman name, the kind carved on a monument. Cicero's runs, in full: Marcus Tullius, son of Marcus, grandson of Marcus, of the Cornelia voting tribe, Cicero.

Your father. Your grandfather. Your voting district. And then, finally, the bit that is you.

That is a name doing a completely different job from ours. It is not a label. It is a certificate. It is proving your citizenship, your descent and your place in the machinery of the Republic, and the personal part is the last thing on the list because it was the least important thing about you.

The Empire eventually let this get out of hand. Under the emperors it became fashionable to bolt on the names of anybody who left you money, on the reasonable basis that you had inherited their name along with their villa. The record holder, a consul in the year 169, had thirty eight names.

The name that told everyone you had been a slave

One more piece, and it is the one that shows what these names were really for.

When a Roman freed a slave, the freed man took his former owner's praenomen and nomen. His slave name stayed on as a cognomen.

Cicero had a secretary called Tiro, an extraordinary man who is possibly the inventor of shorthand and who is the reason a great deal of Cicero survives at all. Cicero freed him.

Tiro's name after that was Marcus Tullius Tiro.

Now read it as a Roman would. Marcus Tullius: that is Cicero's own name, worn by somebody else. And then Tiro, which is not a Roman name, which is a slave's name.

Anybody hearing it knew everything in one second. This man was freed by the Tullii, almost certainly by Cicero himself. He is a citizen now, and he was not born one.

So the name carried the promotion and the record of what he was promoted from, permanently, in the same three words. It is generous and it is a brand at the same time, and there is no version of the name that does one without the other.

That is what a Roman name is. Not a thing you are called. A short public document about where you sit, who put you there, and whether you have always been there.

How these were chosen

Nothing clever, and that is deliberate.

Every item here was chosen by hand, built from the praenomina Romans actually used and the gens names that actually existed. Press Generate and the results are drawn at random, and you will not see the same one twice in a batch.

It works entirely on your machine, and nothing you enter is sent anywhere.

Getting it right in a story

Do not invent a praenomen. This is the one that gives you away instantly to anybody who knows. There were about eighteen and they were not up for negotiation. A Roman man called Darius or Cassius or Maximus as a first name is not a Roman, he is a fantasy novel. Maximus is a fine cognomen and a Roman would never have it as a praenomen.

Reuse the names shamelessly. Writers get nervous about having three characters called Marcus. Rome had thousands. If your cast is all distinct first names, you have written the one thing Rome never had. Use the cognomen to tell them apart, which is exactly what the Romans did.

Women share names, and that is the point. If your Roman family has two daughters and they are called Julia and Livia, their father belongs to two clans at once, which is not a thing. They are both Julia. If it makes your scene confusing, good, that is what Roman letters are like, and every historian has the same problem.

Nomen before cognomen, always. Gaius Julius Caesar, never Gaius Caesar Julius. And in daily speech Romans mixed and matched, some going by praenomen and nomen, some by nomen and cognomen. There was no single correct form of address, which is realistic and useful.

Watch the era. The tria nomina is a Republic and early Empire thing. Push into the late Empire and the whole system is coming apart, praenomina are dying out, and everybody is called Flavius because an emperor handed out citizenship in bulk and the new citizens took his name.

Questions people ask

Why did Romans have three names?

Because one was useless and two were not enough. The first name came from a pool of about eighteen, so it identified nobody. The clan name was shared by everyone in a family that might run to thousands. The third name was the only part doing real work.

Did Roman women really all have the same name?

Within a clan, yes, essentially. Every daughter of a Julius was Julia. Sisters were told apart with elder and younger, or by number if there were several. It is not an exaggeration and it is not a gap in the records.

Why is Gaius abbreviated to C?

Because the alphabet changed and the abbreviation did not. C used to cover the sound that G later took over. By the time the letters were sorted out, C for Gaius was already everywhere, so it stayed.

Is Caesar a first name or a last name?

Neither, exactly. It is a cognomen, marking his branch of the Julii. It became a title afterwards, which is how it ends up in Kaiser and Tsar, but in his lifetime it was the family nickname.

Are Latin names still used?

Constantly, and you have met more of them than you think. Marcus, Julia, Claudia, Anthony, Mark, Paul, Cornelia, Justin, Victor, Camilla. What did not survive is the system. We kept the words and threw away the machine they were part of.

References

1. Roman Nomenclature. VRoma. https://www.vroma.org/vromans/bmcmanus/roman_names.html
2. Roman Personal Nomenclature. University of Vermont. https://www.uvm.edu/~bsaylor/rome/nomenclature.html
3. Binns, M. Roman Personal Names. Pompeii in Pictures. https://pompeiiinpictures.com/pompeiiinpictures/R0/Roman%20Personal%20Names.htm
4. Nomen gentilicium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomen_gentilicium
5. Julia, women of the Julii Caesares. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(women_of_the_Julii_Caesares)