Submitted by eddycurrents on Wed, 08/18/2004 - 9:49am

Stuck for names? Looking for something more memorable than "Robert Smith"? Try these:

For you SF or modern story tellers, here is a random name generator for "normal" names, drawn from US census data. I really like this one. You can specify the "unusualness" of the names:

http://www.kleimo.com/random/name.cfm

This one is terrific. It creates "normal" and fantasy names, names for towns and places, cultural names, and more:

http://www.squid.org/tools/names/

Fantasy name generator, with a number of different rulesets for different name types:

http://spitfire.ausys.se/johan/names/

Windoze users can even download the app itself to have on your PC. Go to http://spitfire.ausys.se/johan/workshop/ and download the 32 bit executable Win version. It's an old Win95 app but it runs in XP. You also need the rule files (look on that page for the link to them and unzip in the same directory as the program). The rules files are in Swedish but it's pretty easy to follow the format if you want to make your own for a particular naming scheme (I did this, very nice).

Here is another fantasy one with a number of unusual rulesets. There is a help section that tells you how to write your own rulesets. That looks really good but since it's all online you would have to save rulesets on your own PC and paste them in.

http://rinkworks.com/namegen/