Tamil Name Generator

Tamil names work differently from most Indian naming systems because Tamils traditionally have no inherited surname. A person is known by a given name plus the father's name, usually shortened to an initial placed in front: R. Murugan is Murugan, son of Ramasamy. Women often take the husband's name as a second element after marriage, and older people may add a caste or community word such as Pillai, Mudaliar, Gounder, Nadar, Thevar, Chettiar, Naicker, Iyer or Iyengar. Many modern families drop those titles, which is why you see plain two-part forms like Senthil Kumar or Kavitha Ramasamy in city records.

The sound of a Tamil name depends on its source. Sanskrit-derived names are shared with the rest of South India: Lakshmi, Venkatesan, Subramaniam, Saraswathi. Pure-Tamil names, revived by the Dravidian movement and now fashionable again, use native words for beauty, light and sweetness: Thenmozhi (honey-tongued), Ezhilarasan (king of beauty), Kayalvizhi (fish-eyed), Inban, Kavin, Oviya, Yazhini. Sri Lankan Tamils keep the father's full name in front and favour long compounds ending in -nathan, -lingam, -ratnam and -rajah, such as Kanagaratnam Thavarajah.

This list mixes all of those registers, plus Tamil Christian and Muslim names and a few figures from Sangam literature and the Ponniyin Selvan era, so a story or dataset can cover grandparents, city professionals and diaspora families believably.