Remember how I’m the queen of procrastination? Well, not long after I discovered the Titlescorer website, I read a post on the Writer’s Technology Companion blog about a website that generated random names that you could use for your characters. I checked it out but was disappointed to see it was only going to spit out English names, not very useful for a lot of my stories and also for the novel I’m working on, because in the same way my world is populated by multiple nationalities, so is my fiction.

So I hunted a little further and found some gems. It’s incredible that some of these sites exist and it’s terrible that I spend time playing around with them when I should be writing, but they could be useful to me at some stage, or to a reader … Anyway my current favourite name generating site (yes, there are many) is Behind the Name which has the facility to randomly generate masculine, feminine or ambiguous names for almost 60 nationalities, along with names from mythology or ancient times.

This is so much more exciting than just looking up a list of typical names for particular nationalities. It’s a game! A little scary at times though. I just asked it to generate a random English girl’s name and it came up with Coretta Edytha Devan Keshia. Probably not a name I’ll use next time I need one, but thanks anyone. For the record, other random hits seemed more believable.