Dark Lord Name Generator

The dark lord is fantasy's oldest archetype of absolute evil, and the names that stick share a recognisable sound. Tolkien built Sauron and Morgoth from his Black Speech and Quenya roots; Rowling took Voldemort from the French for "flight of death"; Robert Jordan's Shai'tan and Brandon Sanderson's Lord Ruler both lean on harsh consonants and religious dread. Good dark lord names tend to be short on soft vowels and heavy on k, z, th, gh and r sounds, which makes them feel ancient and unpleasant to say aloud, exactly the effect you want for a villain that whole nations fear to name.

There are three broad structures worth knowing. The first is the bare name (Vorthax, Ashkaroth), which works when the villain is a person the heroes will actually meet. The second is name plus epithet (Malgorath the Undying, Ravnok the Skinless), where the epithet does the storytelling: it hints at a curse, a deed or a body horror detail. The third is the pure title (The Ashen King, He Who Sits in Shadow), used when the character's real name is lost, forbidden or too dangerous to speak, which is a wonderful mystery hook in itself.

This generator mixes all three so you can pick a proper name, an epithet and a title and let different factions in your world use different ones. The best-remembered dark lords are always the ones whose name people are afraid to say.