h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Very informative. I don't think I ever thought about it like that.

Welcome. Thank you for the suggestion. I often have no idea what to write about.

Did you mean you never thought it about it in terms of how much trouble you could get into with a character name? I have a dangerous imagination.

How do you go about choosing character names?

I mean I mainly never thought about what you say in your section about Playing it Safe.

About the faux pas... let's say if you play an online game and you for instance give your character the name of a Nazi general because you think it's cool there's a 50% chance that it was me who reported you.

That's the problem, I have a really really hard time choosing names for anything. Quite often I take names from books or movies and change them a bit or combine two. But I never really wrote anything big. in fact I can't remember when I last wrote a story at all and one of the reasons for not writing is the inability to find names. I got quite a big story in my head for a long while but I never started writing because all the people have no names.

Why not give them 'place holder' names, and then see what kind of names they grow into?

Songwriters do that all the time. They write 'dummy' lyrics, then fill in later.

Sometimes, the dummy lyrics hang around. Ever heard 'The Boxer'?

That's actually not a bad idea. I think I will try it, thank you!

Let us know how it goes - we want to read the story!

I agree with you, Dmitri, about leaving a marker for a name you haven't decided on and filling it in later.

For my names of French families, I found a list of 'Les noms de famille les plus portes' from a link off French Wiki but it seems to have vanished from the web since.

Also war memorials and cemeteries. You can tell quite a lot about the important families in an area from cemeteries!

That's another cool tip! If your story is regional and/or historical, go browse the phone book in an area, or look at local business ads.

Actor Michael Praed picked his last name out of a phone book. He found out it was Welsh for 'meadow', I think.

I wrote this story, called 'No Weather for Lederhosen' - A87813093 - about my favourite imaginary detective, Friedl Wagner.

'Friedl Wagner, Detektiv' was what the brass plaque on the Sendlingerstrasse in Munich said. I passed it often during the year when I lived there, and I kept imagining this detective in Lederhose. Most of the other details, apart from the ridiculous plot, were things that actually happened that year - including the beer-related court case and the marten attacks on BMWs.

that's great

Thanks for the advice mvp.

Fascinating what is in the filther

Excellent points

I used a couple of different methods in a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo - I closed my eyes and typed randomly on the keyboard to get some letters that I used to form a name, then I took a name I liked and tweaked the letters to make a new name that fitted what I was looking for, and the third one was a name that could deliberately be used as a pun in a plot point

In my short story recently A87922380 I chose John from John Steed in The Avengers, so that went very well with the image on the Entry, and the surname is actually the founder of supermarket chain Tesco but fits ok as a well-stocked tearoom too! Took a while to get the inspiration, though - it isn’t easy. Great question Tav

For me making up names for characters is one of the funnest parts of writing. I know a huge stock to draw from - Afrikaans names, English, names in our many other languages, German, French … with my plant and animal work I've learnt huge numbers of names including Greek and Latin names … I'm pretty sure I can come up with something unique. Fantasy names can be based on 'real' names but changed a bit, and to sound evocative of something. If a character has a 'real' name it helps researching what names mean. For instance my character Valerie in my Wavendreem's Garden series (which I still hope to really get off the ground someday) evokes or has the meanings of strong, healthy, valorous, valuable, and also sounds like Valkyrie, the Norse supernatural women who chose who would die or live during battle. Valerie is indeed a bit Nordic-looking not to mention a tad supernatural.


When writing is supposed to be funny, the sky's the limit. In Desideria the Demonness, the main (human) character is Iolanthe Ariadne Murphy. Iolanthe means 'violet flower', Ariadne means 'most holy', and Murphy means 'sea warrior'. Ariadne was also the woman in Greek Mythology who with a long thread helped the hero Theseus escape the labyrinth of Minos. Talk about pretentious! And also the bits don't quite fit together. She's an avant-garde artist. 'Murphy' of course evokes Murphy's Law, which … well, read the comic.

'Desideria' means 'longing' or 'desire' and as you'll see, she has one overpowering desire …

While her name is rather serious, most other demons in the comic will have funny names, with a sort of 'classical' Latin, Greek or Nordic sound but based on real words, with somewhat nasty meanings.

Well this stuff is great fun for me. My father knew about my penchant for silly names and dreaded what I'd name my children one day if I had any ...

My baby sister had a pet turtle once. It was a very small turtle. It was named Mephistopheles....this was my fault, I was eleven at the time...

Willem brings up a good point: when making up names, try not to be so esoteric that your readers get confused. 'Iolanthe Ariadne Murphy' works because even though 99% of the audience won't get the classical references due to the Decline of Western Civilisation and such, connecting two high-falutin' names with plain old 'Murphy' will make any English speaker laugh. I once made up a character for a radio play called Cassiopeia Jones, same reason. She was a torch singer in a seedy space bar.

“Isn’t that where your old works friend used to live dad?”

“Yup, Henry’s was the one with the massive letterbox, though it’s still not as big as his head was!”

Sometimes you just gotta take what fate throws at you!

All that research into Welsh names and I could’ve just took the dog around the block...that’s the Cavachon we bought off Frank!

Thanks a lot for all your good advice! I never expected so many answers.

Dmitri, folks may not know but these days anyone can look up anything! I look up name meanings a lot, I can't be the only one. In my character I also wanted to joke a bit about parents giving kids pretentious names. It happened much here in SA when I was young. You'd have kids from solid Afrikaner families and surnames with weird names like 'Quenesza' or 'Izelque' … and these were fine people, not to blame them or their parents at all, but some surely do become rather esoteric. The phenomenon is found in all population groups, names based on Biblical names or themes (often very weirdly spelt) being popular. And then our traditional names also include much weirdness, Nelson Mandela's real first name was actually Rolihlahla, which I'm sure will give most English and American speakers great trouble.

And talking of incongruent names … us Afrikaners actually are of very mixed ethnic origins, and while we're mostly of Dutch, French and a bit of German, we had lots of Irish folks taken up among us, and for instance at school we had 100% Afrikaners with names like Peter O' Reilly and Lonsdale O' Donovan. Other guys I know have East European names like Milan Andrin, or Lebanese like Wiam Haddad … all 100% Afrikaans.

My own full name means 'Strong-willed warrior of the star-mountain by the Merwede river'.