About Nick Zoo

Nick Zoo exists because naming things is the part of a creative project that stalls people. A campaign that is otherwise ready sits for a week because nobody can name the innkeeper. A quiz team turns up without a name. A story has a character called "the guard" in chapter nine. None of that needs a week of thought, it needs twelve decent options and thirty seconds.

How a generator here is built

Every generator is a set of word part lists written by hand, one genre at a time, plus the rules for joining them. The joining rules are the part that matters. Most name generators glue random syllables together, which is why they produce names with three consonants stacked in the middle or the same sound repeated at the seam. Here the pieces are written so that any combination still obeys the sound rules of the genre: elvish names flow and end open, dwarf names land on a hard stop, orc names stop dead.

Before a page goes live, a few hundred of its combinations get read out loud. If a run of them is unpronounceable, the pools are wrong and they get rewritten. That is slow, and it is the only way to tell the difference between a generator and a random letter machine.

The fifty picks under each generator

Each page also carries fifty names chosen rather than generated, each with a line on how it sounds and who it suits. They are there because the two tasks are genuinely different. When you need names for twelve villagers, you want a tap. When you need one name for the character the whole story turns on, you want a shortlist someone has already thought about.

What this site does not do

There is no account, no saved history, no credit system and no paywall. Names are generated from a number rather than pulled from storage, so there is nothing to keep and nothing to lose. Names lifted from published books and games are kept off the curated lists on purpose: a name a reader already knows drags somebody else's character in with it.

Getting in touch

If a generator is producing something odd, or there is a kind of name you want and it is not here yet, the Contact page reaches a real inbox. Requests for new generators are how the next ones get chosen.