Hungarian Name Generator

Hungarian is the one major European language where the family name comes first, so a man Americans would call László Kovács is Kovács László in Budapest. The given name (keresztnév) follows the surname (vezetéknév), and Hungarian speakers keep that order even in formal documents. When Hungarians write for an international audience they usually flip to Western order, which is why the same person can appear both ways.

Surnames are dominated by a handful of occupational and descriptive names: Nagy (big), Kovács (smith), Tóth (Slovak), Szabó (tailor), Horváth (Croat), Varga (cobbler), Kiss (small), Molnár (miller), Németh (German), and Farkas (wolf) together cover a huge share of the population. Given names divide into three families. Traditional Christian names like István, János, Erzsébet, and Katalin have Hungarian spellings and pronunciations. Old Magyar names revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Attila, Csaba, Levente, Emese, Enikő, and Réka, are unmistakably Hungarian. And a modern set of short names like Bence, Máté, Hanna, Zoé, and Luca has topped the birth charts since the 2000s.

Every name in this list follows Hungarian order and uses correct diacritics (á, é, í, ó, ö, ő, ú, ü, ű), which matter: Kis and Kiss are different names, and Ágnes without the accent looks foreign.