Random Name Generator
Real names from 49 cultures, US and UK names by birth year, and fantasy names for stories.
Options
Your names
Click a name to copy it.
About the Random Name Generator
Pick a country or culture, a gender and how many names you want, and press Generate names. You get realistic first and last names put together the way that culture does it: two surnames in Spain and Mexico, the family name first in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, Singh or Kaur in Sikh names, patronymics in Russia and Ukraine, and the father’s name in Ethiopian and many Arabic names. Names in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic and Greek script are shown in that script too.
India is split by region — Hindi belt, Punjab, Bengal, Odisha, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Urdu Muslim names — and US and UK names follow official birth statistics, so a character born in the 1950s gets a name people really were given then. Switch to Fantasy and fiction for elf, dwarf, orc, halfling, dragon, medieval, Norse, sci-fi and fairy names built from syllable rules. Everything is made in your browser; it only ever makes names, never addresses, phone numbers or ID numbers.
How to use it
- Choose Real names or Fantasy and fiction.
- Pick a Country or culture (or a fantasy Style), the Gender and How many names you want (1–1,000). For the United States and England and Wales, choose the decade or year someone was Born in. To get names beginning with certain letters, fill in First name starts with (Latin or native letters; accents are ignored).
- Tick Add a middle name (or the father’s name, patronymic or mother’s surname, depending on the culture) if you want full formal names.
- Press Generate names. Click any name to copy it, or use Copy all, .txt or .csv to take the whole list — choose full names, “Last name, first name”, first names only, last names only or the native script first.
Examples
For example: Keerthana Subramanian · Nandhini Krishnan · Saranya Iyer
Every batch is different; these show the kind of names you get.
For example: James Robert Miller · Michael David Johnson
First names are drawn in proportion to how many babies got them that decade (SSA data).
For example: Noura Khalid Al-Qahtani — نورة خالد القحطاني
For example: Thrunhild Ironbeard · Bardur Stonebreaker
Common uses
- Naming characters in novels, scripts, comics and role-playing games, with names that fit the character’s country, community and age.
- Realistic, non-real names for test data, demos, UI mock-ups and sample spreadsheets (download as CSV).
- Classroom role-plays, worksheets and case studies with names from many cultures.
- Fantasy names for game masters, world-builders and players.
Where the names come from
- United States: first names from the Social Security Administration’s national baby-name data (the 500 most given names for each sex in each decade, 1920s–2020s, with how often they were given); surnames from the US Census Bureau’s census surname list (the 2,000 most common, weighted by frequency). Both are public-domain US government data.
- England and Wales: the Office for National Statistics’ top 100 baby names for each sex in 1944, 1954 … 2024, plus 2025, picked evenly. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Surnames are a hand-picked list of common surnames, because no official surname list is published.
- China, Korea and Vietnam: surnames weighted by published counts — China’s Ministry of Public Security name reports (counts of the top 20 and a ranking of the top 100), Statistics Korea’s census (Kim alone is about one Korean in five) and Lê Trung Hoa’s shares of Vietnamese surnames (Nguyễn about 38%). Japan publishes no surname counts, so the 100 most common Japanese surnames are picked evenly.
- Everything else, including the Indian regions and all given names outside the US and England and Wales, comes from hand-curated lists of names that are common today across generations, picked evenly. They are lists, not frequency data.
How the names are put together
- Where a region has more than one naming tradition — Hindu, Christian and Muslim names in Kerala, Sikh and Hindu names in Punjab, Muslim and Christian names in the Levant and Egypt — every name is built within one tradition, so a first name never meets a surname that would not go with it.
- Feminine surname forms are used for women where the language has them: Kowalska in Poland, Ivanova and Pokrovskaya in Russia, Papadopoulou in Greece, Ostrovska in Ukraine.
- Ukrainian names are written in Latin letters with Ukraine’s official transliteration (the one used in passports), Russian ones with the simplified spellings usual in English, and Greek ones as on Greek passports.
- Within one batch every full name is different. If fewer distinct names exist than you asked for, you get all of them and a note says so.
How the randomness works
Names are drawn with your browser’s cryptographic random number generator (crypto.getRandomValues), without bias: weighted lists use 53-bit random numbers against running totals, and even picks use rejection sampling. Nothing is predictable from earlier batches.
Limitations
- Outside the official US, UK, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese data, names are picked evenly from curated lists, so a rare name in a list is as likely as a very common one.
- Indian names are shown in Latin script only; Telugu house names and Tamil initials (S. Karthik) are described but not added.
- Gender follows each culture’s usual use of a name. Many names — Sikh names, several Yoruba and Igbo names, Anh in Vietnam, Sai in India — are given to girls and boys alike.
- A generated name can match a real person by coincidence; the names are not taken from any list of people.
- Fantasy names are newly assembled from syllables and word lists; check that a name you like is not already a famous character before you publish it.
Privacy
Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.
Frequently asked questions
Are these real people’s names?
No. First names and surnames are picked separately and put together at random, so a full name belongs to no one in particular — though with common names it can match a real person by chance. The tool makes names only: no addresses, emails, phone numbers or ID numbers.
How do I get names that fit a character’s age?
Choose United States or United Kingdom — England and Wales and set Born in. A woman born in the 1950s in the US is most likely to get Mary, Linda or Patricia; one born in the 2010s, Emma, Olivia or Sophia — exactly as often as the official statistics say.
Why does the surname come first for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese names?
That is the normal order in those languages (Wang Fang, Sato Haruto, Kim Min-jun). Tick Given name first (Western order) if you need the given name first, as on many English forms.
Can I download the names for a spreadsheet or test data?
Yes. Generate up to 1,000 names and press .csv. The file has columns for full name, given name, middle name, family name, gender, native script, culture and birth decade, with a UTF-8 marker so Excel shows accents and non-Latin scripts correctly.
Can I use the names in my book or game?
Yes — names themselves are not protected, and these are random combinations. Do check that a name is not already strongly linked to a famous person or character before you publish.
Does it work offline?
Yes, after the first use. Each group of name lists (from about 1 KB to 75 KB for the US data) downloads the first time you generate names from it; after that it works without a connection, and nothing you choose is sent anywhere.