Old English Name Generator

"Old English" means two different things, and this generator covers both. Strictly, Old English is the Anglo-Saxon language spoken in England before 1100, and its names were compounds of two meaningful elements: Ælf (elf) + red (counsel) gives Ælfred, Ead (wealth) + gyth (battle) gives Eadgyth, Wulf + stan gives Wulfstan. Those people had no surnames, so they appear here either bare or with a byname such as Leofric of Lichfield or Hereward the Wake. Many of these names survived in worn-down forms that still read as old-fashioned English: Alfred, Edith, Edmund, Audrey (from Æthelthryth), Mildred, Wilfred, Godric and Harold.

The looser sense, the names of old England, runs from the Norman and medieval gentry (Piers, Fulke, Hawise, Amice, Idonea) through Tudor households (Thomasina, Humphrey, Ursula), Puritan virtue names (Temperance, Obadiah, Mercy) and the Victorian and Edwardian registers that gave us Bartholomew, Prudence, Percival and Gladys. Each is paired with a surname that actually arose in England: place names like Ashworth and Wakefield, trades like Wainwright and Fletcher, and nicknames like Lightfoot and Fairweather.

To place a character in a century, match the given-name layer to the period and keep surnames from the same region, since a Yorkshire Ramsbottom and a Cornish Tregenza would rarely meet before the railways.