It's a random name generator!  Use it to create names for characters in books, role-playing games, or anything else you can imagine.  All of these are free to use.  If you like a name a lot, and especially if you use it, please hit the thumbs-up button!  This will increase its quality score, which will tell the generator algorithm that this was a good name.  The algorithm will take your opinion under advisement :)

​

The Algorithm:

​

These names were all generated using a Markov-chain complex with degrees between 3 and 5.  The chain is seeded from a corpus of several hundred to several thousand names each, and then they are stochastically combined into canonical "name forms."  For instance, "<title> <firstname> <lastname> of <location>" is a name form, and a Markov chain generates a value to fill in for each of the bracketed items.  

To improve the quality of output names, and to increase fidelity to the phonotactics of the language being generated, the Markov chains operate on tokens of length ~2.  These tokens are segmented using an (over-simplified) syllabification algorithm that splits strings into "pseudo-syllables."  This is done by detecting syllable nucleus, and then expanding each syllable nucleus to include an onset and/or a coda by applying a sonority hierarchy.  To keep the algorithm simple, the computation is done entirely on letters-- there's never any conversion from lexeme to phonetic representation.  Without this extra step, perfect syllabification is impossible.

​

The chain generates several thousand names at a time, which are then added to a name queue, which is shuffled and presented one-at-a-time to users like you!  Users can use the "like" and "dislike" buttons to sort names up or down if they think a name is particularly good or bad, respectively.  

​