Hippie Name Generator

Hippie names came out of the 1960s counterculture, when young people in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, on communes across California and New Mexico, and at festivals like Woodstock rejected the buttoned-down names of their parents. Instead of Robert and Susan, they called themselves and their children Sunshine, River, Rainbow, and Meadow. The pattern is simple: pick something from nature, the sky, or a state of mind, and pair it with either another evocative word or a plain surname that grounds it in reality.

The vocabulary breaks into a few families. Nature names (Willow, Fern, Sequoia, Sparrow) are the most common and the most likely to survive as real given names today. Cosmic and astrological names (Aquarius, Nova, Solstice) reflect the era's fascination with the Age of Aquarius. Sanskrit and Hindu borrowings (Shanti, Bodhi, Krishna, Ananda) came in through interest in Eastern spirituality after the Beatles went to India. Then there are commune nicknames, the kind of handle you earn rather than are given: Patchouli Pat, Deadhead Danny, Tie Dye Ty.

A good hippie name feels warm and slightly unselfconscious. It should sound like something a person actually answered to around a campfire in 1969, not a fantasy elf.