Makin' NamesWinter is approaching and, like every year about this time, I am feeling more inspired than usual to extend my (fairly limited) programming skills and do something kinda silly. Yesterday I was thinking about names. How hard can it be to write a program that takes in a
list of regular names from a predominantly English-speaking region and use that to make new names that follow those popular patterns?
Since this is the internet, I'm about the 7000th person to ask that question, which has been answered
many times, but that's not really an issue. It's just as fun to do something that has already been done and see how your results compare to other people. Turns out it's rather easy.
I can go into details about how it works if anybody wants, but for now I'll just skip to the end. I made a dumb thing that generates fake (well... occasionally real, but usually fake) names based on a database of baby names from Ontario, Canada ranging from 1917 to 2010. You can filter by sex or year range and get distinctly different names based on popular baby names from different times.
Here's the first 10 results from some different generation criteria (excluding real names):
1917 - 1937 female namesVelva
Linez
Rette
Eila
Arthur
Aliselly
Oelah
Phemilia
Osaline
1990 - 2010 female namesRigitt
Ranjelissa
Eaghann
Arolina
Elaide
Hafsa
Rowynn
Haniela
1960 mixed gender namesAiren
Semargrei
Ectori
Nitalid
Olynnetta
Minial
Hylisa
Osalian
Elenny
Jamelodiego
2010 Male NamesRrencer
Muaz
Bastanton
Asen
Aydin
Rmaile
Oukas
Organg
Erese
Jaxel
Minikit
So there's some problems with the beginnings of names. It likes to stick two consonants together. I know how I can fix that, which I guess I can do in the future if I find actual use for this. Bumpgrrl suggested that I can market this as a mobile app for people who have difficulty naming their D&D characters.
If you want to try it,
here it is. Only works in Windows and requires .Net 4.0 framework on account of the SQLite library that I used. There's a variable there called "chain length". If you set that to 2 you'll get weirder names. If you set it to 5 or higher you'll get a lot of real names. 3 seems to be the magic number. Also it gets messed up around accented letters and hyphens. C# source is in there too.
Note: Yes, I know I am WAY overdue for improving the bulb stuff on the forums. I just really hate PHP and it's a bitch to test.