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Character name generator

Real names people were given in the country and decade your character was born, or the century before records began, with how common each one was. Or switch to fantasy names.

    Given names: US Social Security Administration, 1880–2025. Family names: US Census Bureau, the 1,000 most common in the 2010 Census. Both public domain. Older centuries: Wikidata, people born then by citizenship or birthplace, untitled, women and men counted apart, CC0.

    How to name a character

    • Start from the birth year, not the story year. A woman of forty in a novel set in 1995 was named in the 1950s, so look there.
    • Say it aloud with the family name. A short first name steadies a long surname. Two long ones can sound like a law firm.
    • Keep the cast apart. Give your main characters different first letters and different lengths, and readers will never confuse two of them.
    • Let rarity say something. The most common name of a decade lets a character blend in. A rare one says somebody chose it on purpose.
    • Search it before you commit. A famous namesake or an unlucky meaning is easier to change on page one than on page three hundred.

    Where the names come from

    The decades come from each country's own birth statistics: Social Security card applications in the United States since the 1880s, Insee's register in France, the national statistics offices of Britain, Ireland, Spain, Poland, Norway, and Sweden, and the provincial and state registrars of Ontario and South Australia. Family names come from the same offices where they publish them, so they do not change with the decade you pick. The credit under the names says which records you are drawing from.

    Before those registers began, the names come from older records. Sweden and the Netherlands have opened their parish and baptism books, so their centuries are ordinary children, girls and boys alike, as the clerk wrote them down. Elsewhere the only open source is Wikidata, which remembers far more men than women and more of the famous than of anyone else. The generator leaves out the titled and the sainted, counts women and men apart, and offers a century only when its women's names run as deep as the bar it sets for men. That is why most countries begin in the 1700s or 1800s.

    Each name shows its rank in that decade or century and, where the records give counts, roughly how many people of that sex had it. Common is the top tenth of the list, uncommon the next four tenths, and rare the rest. As common as in life draws the way you would meet people: often the names everyone had, sometimes one you have never heard.

    Keep them beside your manuscript

    Lock the names you like and press Copy all. In Tabularia, paste each one into a new People sheet, which keeps a character's role, looks, and goals next to the page you are writing. The Sheets guide shows how.

    Other versions

    Try it on your own manuscript

    Nothing is metered: as many projects as you like at any length, the outline and minimap to move through them, drafts and markup mode for revising, snapshots to return to, sheets and timelines beside the page, and export to DOCX, PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, plain text and Fountain. Bring in what you have already written and read it back as a book.

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    The Cloud plan is $18 a month, or $172.80 a year, and adds backup, sync across your devices, sharing a manuscript for review, and publishing your work as a web page — the readers and collaborators you invite do not need a paid account of their own. Tabularia is in Public Beta and shipping steadily; the release notes record what has landed.