About The Name Generator
How it works
The random name generating tool can spit out over 463 billion different combination of first and last names. Where does the name data come from? From the Census Bureau. They've collected the most popular male (1,219 names), female (4,275 names) and last names (88,930) in the United States and made the data publicly available online.
You can use this tool to generate completely random names, or you can explore the additional options that allow you to:
- specify gender
- specify minimum and maximum character lengths
- filter names by what they begin or end with
- filter names by specific characters or parts of names
What's it for?
This tool was designed for two different groups of people: Parents (Baby names) and Authors (Character Names). It is intended to be a creative tool, for moms, dads, authors, artists and other clever people who want to brainstorm characters or ideas and need a place to start. As an extra wrinkle, the background and foreground colors shift randomly with each newly generated name. In the future I may include options that allow you to control certain aspects of this as well.
How it used to work
In the previous incarnation of this name generator, which ran from about 2007 until early 2012, you were allowed to "tag" names based on your visceral reaction to it. This data was interesting (What do people perceive to be a "fat" name? An "evil" or "good" name?) and has been saved, but that functionality has been suspended for the time being. I'm considering bringing it back in some fashion, but not until I clean up the current data first.
Possibly FAQs
What happened to the iPhone version?
Originally a separate iPhone-optimized version of this site used to exist, but the new layout has been designed to be responsive and should look and function great on a wide variety of browsers and devices. That being said, I'm considering a standalone iPhone app sometime this year. Functionally I would want it to be more in the vein of a creative, brainstorming tool than something that simply spits out randomly generated names (Because there are certainly no shortage of those on the iTunes App Store).
What happened to the Facebook version?
I'm in the process of closing down my Facebook account and don't want to maintain it. Sorry.
What happened to the feeds?
Because when the names could be tagged and saved I kept a feed of the most recently generated names that people could subscribe to. Surprisingly, quite a few people did. Unfortunately, since the new version does not have this tagging feature in place, there's really nothing to generate a feed from. Sorry. Maybe in the future.
What happened to Google gadget version?
Another thing that surprisingly many people were using. Sorry, it's gone and I have no plans to bring it back.
Can I contact you?
If you really want to contact me, I can be found and contacted.