Old Person Name Generator

An old person's name sounds old because it was fashionable seventy or eighty years ago and then fell out of use. Someone who is 85 today was born in the early 1940s, so the believable first names are the ones that topped the charts then and are rare on playgrounds now: Harold, Eugene, Vernon, Clarence, Leroy, Melvin and Norman for men; Mildred, Doris, Bernice, Gladys, Thelma, Lois and Geraldine for women. A character in their late sixties or seventies was born in the 1950s, which shifts the list toward Gary, Dennis, Larry, Ronald, Judith, Carol, Linda and Joyce.

Surnames matter just as much. The oldest generation in English-speaking countries includes the children and grandchildren of the great immigration waves, so Italian, Polish, Irish, German, Jewish, Scandinavian, Mexican-American, Japanese-American and Black American surnames all belong here alongside older English and Scots-Irish names. Regional flavor helps too: double names like Betty Lou, Ora Lee and Billy Ray read as Southern and rural, French surnames such as Boudreaux and Thibodeaux place a character in Louisiana, and names like Solveig Bjornstad point to the upper Midwest.

Use these names for grandparents in a novel, residents of a retirement community, elderly NPCs, obituaries and letters in period fiction, or any character whose name should carry a few decades of history.