Old German Name Generator

Old German names are almost all compounds of two meaningful elements, and once you know the pieces the whole tradition opens up. Adal means noble, so Adalbert is 'noble-bright' and Adelheid 'noble-kind'. Hild and gund both mean battle, giving Hildegard, Hildegund, Kunigunde and Brunhild. Frid is peace (Friedrich, Gottfried, Winfried), wolf and bern (bear) supplied fierce names like Wolfram, Wolfhard and Bernhard, and ric means ruler, as in Dietrich ('ruler of the people') and Heinrich ('home ruler'). Names were not chosen for meaning so much as inherited element by element, which is why a family might produce Sigebert, Sigehard and Sieglinde across three generations.

Surnames arrived late, between the 12th and 15th centuries. Ordinary people took a trade (Schmied, Kürschner, Rademacher), a place (Breitenbach, Hohenstein, Lauterbach) or a nickname (Schwarzkopf, Unverzagt, Bleibtreu), while landed families used von plus the name of their castle or manor: Konrad von Hohenburg, Hildegard von Rodenstein. Before surnames, a man was known by a byname, so you will also find forms like Hagen der Rote and Ulrich Starkhand here.

The list mixes Carolingian-era names (Hruodland, Theutberga, Pippin), high-medieval ones and old-fashioned 19th-century favorites like Wilhelmine, Gottlieb and Ottilie, so it works for historical fiction, ancestry-flavored characters and fantasy settings that want a genuinely Germanic sound.