English Name Generator

English names carry a surprising amount of information about class, region and decade. Given names cycle hard: Oliver, George, Harry, Amelia and Isla top today's registers in England, while Kevin, Tracey and Darren place someone in the 1970s and Horace, Gladys and Wilfred in the 1910s. The gentry have always favored long Latinate or revived medieval names (Peregrine, Araminta, Tarquin), working-class families short diminutives used as full names (Alfie, Elsie, Reggie), and the current fashion for vintage revivals means a toddler named Arthur or Ada can share a name with her great-grandmother.

Surnames fall into four sources: occupations (Fletcher, Thatcher, Cartwright), places (Wakefield, Ashworth, Pontefract), nicknames (Whitehead, Armstrong) and patronymics (Williams, Robson). Region shows in the endings. Yorkshire and Lancashire produced -thwaite, -bottom, -royd and -shaw names (Micklethwaite, Ramsbottom, Ackroyd); Cornwall has Tre-, Pol- and Pen- (Trevithick, Polglase, Penrose); the North East gives Charlton, Robson and Blenkinsop; the southern shires lean to Old English habitation names ending in -ham, -ton and -ley.

For fantasy, Anglo-Saxon given names like Eadric, Leofric and Aethelflaed with a place-style surname read as English without being modern. Double-barrelled surnames with a hyphen signal old money or a Victorian marriage alliance, and are best used sparingly.