LitMemoA Character Name Library for Fiction Writers: Surnames and Given Names by Setting, Plus How to Make a Family Sound Like a Family
This isn't an article about how to think about names. It's a list you can pick from. If you want the reasoning—deriving a name from a character's temperament and role—that's covered separately. This is the material: surnames and given names, split across five settings, ready to mix and match.
Before you start copying, though, spend a minute on the three filters below. Most writers aren't stuck because no names come to mind—they're stuck because everything that comes to mind sounds alike. Same length, same stress pattern, same initial letter, and by chapter three the reader has quietly stopped telling anyone apart.
Three filters to run first
Filter 1: are they distinguishable from each other?
The most practical rule and the most forgotten one. Across your principal cast, spread out three things:
- Don't repeat initials. Marcus, Miriam, and Mattias in the same scene will blur.
- Vary syllable count. An all-three-syllable cast reads as one texture. Mix in a one-syllable name.
- Vary the stress pattern. Three names in a row that land on the first syllable start to sound like one person.
The test is crude and it works: write your principals in a single column and read them aloud. If you have to stop and think "which one is this," your reader will stop harder.
Filter 2: does the sound match the role?
Names carry weight before meaning. Roughly three registers:
| Register | Sound tendencies | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Hard, adversarial | Stops and hard consonants, short vowels (Pike, Volk, Trask, Kest, Brock) | Antagonists, soldiers, people who act |
| Cool, distant | Open vowels, liquid consonants (Elowen, Marisol, Ilya, Saoirse, Rune) | Quiet characters, figures held at a distance |
| Plain, memorable | Everyday names, unremarkable on purpose (Dan, Ruth, Owen, Grace, Tom) | Viewpoint characters, supporting cast |
You don't have to obey this. But giving your protagonist and your antagonist names in the same register is a very common oversight.
Filter 3: can it be pronounced, and typed?
Fantasy and SF trip on this constantly. A name a reader can't say is a name they can't remember, and a name they can't spell is one they can't use when they talk about your book. If readers start calling a character "the one with the apostrophes," the name has failed.
Surnames
Contemporary
Ordinary and unremarkable (good for viewpoint characters, where the name shouldn't call attention to itself): Reyes, Novak, Whitfield, Okafor, Lindqvist, Barros, Hollis, Nakamura, Delgado, Ashby, Farrell, Vance, Mahal, Bergeron, Osei
A degree of distance (carries better for a lead or a figure of authority): Ravensworth, Sinclaire, Thorne, Vasquez-Hale, Ashgrove, Marchetti, Kestrel, Ferro, Winterbourne, Calloway
Historical / period
Bramwell, Ashcombe, Standish, Hargrave, Pemberton, Fairweather, Crowther, Wingate, Radcliffe, Alderton, Bexley, Halloran, Tarrant
Secondary-world fantasy
Invented surnames work when they feel like they come from one language, not from a random generator. Two reliable methods:
- Compound a landscape word with a common suffix: Stonemere, Ashfall, Grimhold, Duskwater, Thornvale, Rimewick, Hollowmarch
- Name by office or trade, the way real surnames formed — from the person doing the job or the title they held, never from the object: Mercer, Tanner, Fletcher, Chamberlain, Bailiff, Warden, Reeve, Marshal
Keep one method per culture. If the eastern kingdom uses landscape names and the western one uses office names, readers learn where a character is from before you tell them—one of the cheapest returns available in worldbuilding.
Given names by setting
Contemporary
| Register | Masculine-leaning | Feminine-leaning | Unisex |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plain, memorable | Dan, Owen, Marcus, Tom, Isaac, Leo | Ruth, Grace, Nadia, Claire, Ines, Maya | Alex, Sam, Jordan, Rowan, Quinn |
| Textured | Ellery, Caspian, Idris, Ambrose, Tobias, Peregrine | Marisol, Vivienne, Delphine, Saoirse, Isolde | Wren, Ash, Emory, Lior, Sable |
| Odd, sticks in memory | Sterling, Halloway, Crane, Sunday | Perdita, Winter, Solstice, Kestrel | Sylvan, Vesper, Shepherd |
Historical / period
| Type | Names |
|---|---|
| Formal, high register | Augustus, Cordelia, Bartholomew, Eugenie, Reginald, Millicent |
| Working, plain | Nell, Josiah, Bess, Amos, Tabitha, Silas |
| Puritan virtue names | Constance, Mercy, Patience, Thankful, Verity, Prudence, Increase |
| Old Testament / Hebraic | Obadiah, Ezekiel, Hezekiah, Naomi, Reuben, Keziah |
Secondary-world fantasy
The trap is names that sound like a modern person wandered in. What works as a given name is a single invented word with a familiar shape — recognisably a person's name, not a place:
Corin, Theryn, Kaelen, Branok, Vane, Aisling, Sereth, Amariel, Vaelin, Orin, Nimue, Thessaly, Ellandine
⚠️ Compound noun pairs belong to places and houses, not people. Emberfall, Coldharrow, Greyhollow, Rimefall read as toponyms or family seats (the Winterfell pattern) — put them in the surname and place-name columns, not the given-name one. Mixing the two is one of the fastest ways to make invented naming feel arbitrary.
Science fiction
SF names age badly when they lean on apostrophes and stacked consonants. Two options that hold up:
- Genuinely drifted names — a familiar name worn down by a few centuries, which is what real linguistic erosion looks like: Zander (Alexander), Zabeth (Elizabeth), Stoff (Christopher), Rix, Jax, Kess, Tavi
- Short names drawn from global traditions, used intact — a plausible far-future population isn't monolingual: Ansel, Yara, Imani, Vikram, Juno, Anwen, Teodor, Sena, Halden
Don't conflate the two: Yara and Vikram are living names with their own histories, not eroded English ones. Presenting them as futuristic-sounding inventions is the kind of slip readers from those traditions notice immediately.
Invented-language cultures
If you're building a language-flavored culture, decide its sound inventory before you name anyone: which consonants exist, whether syllables can end in a consonant, how long a word can get. Then every name comes from the same well.
One consistent inventory — soft consonants, every syllable open (each one ends in a vowel), two to three syllables: Meliso, Ravana, Sethi, Oreva, Nalu, Tala, Kivea
A second, deliberately different inventory — same softness but closed final syllables allowed: Talan, Kiveth, Meren, Soral, Anuk
Keep one inventory per culture. The moment a name from the second list appears among the first, readers feel the seam even if they can't name what's wrong — which is exactly the effect you want when a character is an outsider.
Families, clans, and crews: making a group read as a group
This is where people looking for a name list actually get stuck: you need a whole household, an entire order, a full ship's crew—and you dry up around the fifth one.
What makes a set of names feel related is sharing exactly one rule:
| Method | How | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Shared element | A recurring root or syllable across a generation | Aldwin, Aldric, Aldis → next generation switches to Ber- |
| Shared theme | All drawn from one category | Aster, Lyra, Vega, Carina (stars) |
| Shared shape | Everyone one syllable, or everyone three | Kest, Bram, Doss |
| Patronymic or matronymic | Built from the parent's name | Ansel → Anselsdottir, Anselsson |
| The deliberate outlier | One member breaks the rule on purpose | Everyone is named for a star; one is called Bill |
That last one earns its keep. A fostered child, an illegitimate heir, a late recruit—an unmatched name tells the reader their position faster than three paragraphs of backstory.
One rule is usually enough, and stacking them without a reason reads as generator output rather than something parents chose. The exception is real and worth knowing: dynasties stack on purpose. Anglo-Saxon and Germanic houses combined a shared root with shared themes, and the most-cited fantasy example does the same — Martin's Targaryens share a phonetic root, a cadence, and a royal naming tradition all at once. If your family has that kind of institutional weight behind it, stacking reads as lineage. If it's an ordinary household, one rule.
Before / After
| Named as you go (❌) | Filtered and patterned (✅) | |
|---|---|---|
| Distinguishable | Marcus, Miriam, Mattias | Marcus, Wren, Doss |
| Register | Hero and villain both soft | Hero plain, villain hard |
| Setting | A secondary world with a "Brian" | One naming method per culture |
| Family | Five siblings with nothing in common | One shared root; the outlier breaks it |
| Reader experience | Lost track by chapter three | The name says which house they're from |
Three common mistakes
- Naming one at a time and never looking at the set. Each name is fine alone; together they're all three syllables with the same stress. Write the cast in one column and look at it whole.
- Loading every name with meaning. If every character's name carries etymology and foreshadowing, nothing stands out. Let the supporting cast have ordinary names.
- Stacking family rules. Shared root plus shared theme plus shared shape reads as mechanical. Pick one and commit.
The real work starts after the names
Naming is the first gate, not the hard part. Once the cast grows, what actually costs you time is remembering who's who, who's related to whom, and how a character was referred to eleven chapters ago. In ensemble stories especially, scrolling back through your own draft to find a minor character's full name is a quiet, recurring tax.
LitMemo's character management gives every character separate fields for name, appearance, and background, and mentioning a character while you write pulls their record up beside the text—no scrolling back. Family and faction membership come out as a relationship graph, so who's whose cousin, and which characters share a naming root, is visible at a glance. Past ten characters, that difference stops being subtle.
If you just want to get names and basics written down first, the character sheet is ready to use, and the practical reasoning behind its field split is here.
Summary
Naming stalls not because you can't think of words, but because you have no list to pick from and no rule for picking.
The list is above. The rules are three: make the cast distinguishable from each other (initials, syllable count, stress), match the register to the role, and keep it pronounceable and typeable. For families, remember one line—share one rule, and let the outlier break it on purpose.