Irish Name Generator

Irish names carry two spellings at once. Most given names have an Irish-language form and an anglicised twin: Aoife and Eva, Tadhg and Tim, Séamus and James, Sinéad and Jane, Eoghan and Owen. The fada (the accent on á, é, í, ó, ú) marks a long vowel and changes the sound, so Seán is "shawn" while Sean without it would rhyme with "seen". Intimidating-looking spellings follow consistent rules: "bh" and "mh" sound like v or w, "dh" and "gh" are soft, and "Siobhán" is simply shiv-AWN.

Surnames are built from the Gaelic prefixes Ó ("grandson/descendant of") and Mac ("son of"), which English records turned into O' and Mc or Mac. In Irish, women's surnames change too: a daughter of Ó Briain is Ní Bhriain, a daughter of Mac Cárthaigh is Nic Cárthaigh. Norman families who arrived in the 1100s left Fitzgerald, Burke, Power and Roche, and some names are tied to regions, with O'Sullivan and McCarthy thick in Cork and Kerry, Gallagher and O'Doherty in Donegal.

A believable Irish name matches form and setting. A Dublin office worker reads as Ciara Ryan, a character in a Gaeltacht village or a Celtic-flavoured fantasy as Caoimhe Ní Mhurchú, and a 1900s emigrant as Bridget Flanagan. Mixing a fada-heavy first name with a plain English surname is normal in modern Ireland.