Common Name Generator

A common name is one nobody looks at twice. It pairs a first name that sat near the top of the birth charts for its generation with a surname from the most frequent few hundred in the census, so the result reads as a real neighbour, coworker or classmate rather than a character. In the United States that means surnames like Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Garcia, Miller, Davis, Rodriguez and Martinez; in Britain it means Smith, Jones, Taylor, Brown, Williams, Wilson, Davies, Evans and Patel. The first name does the age work: Linda, Robert and Gary suggest someone born in the 1950s, Jennifer and Kevin the 1970s, Ashley and Tyler the 1990s, and Emma, Liam and Noah today.

The list is weighted the way a real phone book is: mostly English, Irish and Scottish names, a large share of Spanish surnames, and a spread of the South Asian, East Asian, West African, Italian, Polish and Arabic names that are now among the most common in American and British cities. Casual forms (Mike, Dave, Sue, Bob) are mixed in alongside full forms, because that is how ordinary people actually introduce themselves. Use it for background characters, dummy records, test accounts or tutorial examples, and nobody will wonder why the name sounds invented.