Virus Name Generator

Virus names follow patterns you can learn in about a minute, and once you see them, invented names become easy to build. The largest group is geographic: Ebola takes its name from a river, Marburg from a German university town, Lassa from a Nigerian village, Hendra from a suburb of Brisbane, and Sin Nombre literally means "no name" because researchers could not agree on a place. Add "fever virus" or "encephalitis virus" to a plausible toponym and you have something that reads as real, which is exactly how Kestrel Point virus and Ironvale encephalitis virus work.

The second pattern is descriptive. Respiratory syncytial virus, foot-and-mouth disease virus, and vesicular stomatitis virus all name the tissue or the symptom. The third is acronymic and increasingly dominant, because the WHO now discourages place-based names: SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV, HIV. Formal taxonomy sits above all of this, with families ending in -viridae and genera in -virus, so Ebola virus belongs to Filoviridae.

Capitalization trips people up. Only the proper-noun part is capitalized, so it is Ebola virus and Zika virus with a lowercase v, but Cytomegalovirus stands alone as one word.