Male Name Generator

A convincing male name tells you roughly when a man was born before you learn anything else about him. Walter, Harold, Clarence and Earl were the names of the 1920s; Gary, Dennis, Keith and Larry belong to the 1950s; Jason, Brian, Kevin and Jeff dominate the 1970s; Tyler, Brandon, Austin and Cody mark the 1990s; and Liam, Noah, Oliver and Theodore top today's birth charts. Names such as Arthur, Silas, Jasper and Felix skipped a couple of generations and are now back, which is why they feel both old-fashioned and current at the same time.

The surname supplies the rest of the picture. English place and trade names (Whitfield, Pemberton, Archer) read Anglo-American; Irish and Scottish names (Gallagher, MacLeod, O'Connell) point to a different lineage; Italian, German, Polish, Scandinavian, Spanish, Arabic, Indian, Nigerian and Japanese surnames (Moretti, Weber, Kowalski, Lindqvist, Delgado, Haddad, Sharma, Okafor, Tanaka) place a character in a specific country or diaspora. Matching first and last name from one tradition sounds like an old family line; mixing them (Rohan Castellanos, Kwame Lindqvist) sounds like a modern blended household.

This generator combines all of those layers so you can choose by era, origin and mood. Read each name aloud, check that first and last do not run together awkwardly, and make sure the initials spell nothing unfortunate.