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:
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.
This is intended to be a creative tool, designed for 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.
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).
I'm in the process of closing down my Facebook account and don't want to maintain it. Sorry.
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.
Another thing that surprisingly many people were using. Sorry, it's gone and I have no plans to bring it back.
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