What's in a Name? - Finding the Perfect Name for Your Characters, Places, and Monuments

     I’m not a mom of human children. I have two fur babies, a black cat named Spook and an orange cat named Tarot, but my inboxes are filled to the brim with new mom emails and coupons I’ll never use. Why? Because I frequent baby name sites. 

Character crafting is an artform within an artform. You have to craft a character to craft a story, but picking a name can be a painful process. I’ve found in my writing journey that character names develop one of two ways for me.

Firstly, I sometimes hear a name and instantly a character forms inside my mind as if just by speaking the name they were spoken into existence. 

Secondly, the character starts as a faceless mannequin and I have to paint on the features myself. Most often than not, my characters form by the second method. This means I have to search for names because the characters didn’t come to me with one like a big brand doll. 

Baby name sites are a wonderful resource for us writers. You can search by gender, letter, meaning, or origin. I prefer obscure names. I tend to stay away from the Johns, Sarahs, and Pauls unless I need a common name for a certain character’s persona. For instance, I wanted a traditional name for the prince of Morzania in Tales for Morzania, so I went with Thomas. In Web of Lies, I knew Xander’s name had to be Greek and his last name had to come from an ancient Greek clan. Thus he was originally named Xander of the Dorian Clan and changed his name to Xander Dorian when he needed an official surname.

Matthew Hex, in Web of Lies, got his name mostly by accident. I picked Matthew because I wanted something boyish. Something that conjured up images of scooters, scraped knees, tree climbing, and grins. His last name was a complete fluke. I wrote down the first thing I could think of, Hex, and then realized at the end of book one (White Lies) that the name had a legit reason to exist. Sometimes names just happen like that. They may seem pointless at first but then as you write you come to find out that they have a great deal to do with the plot.

The character I had the hardest time naming was Juliana, from Tales from Morzania. Going into the story I had no idea who she was outside of the fact that she was sold into human trafficking, forced to be an assassin, and went by the nickname The Jewel (article included). Originally I wanted to call her Leliana, but it didn’t quite fit. It just felt wrong, like I was forcing her into a pair of clothes that were the wrong size. 

The only part of Leliana that I was in love with was Ana. But Ana and Anna were the same names of another character I made (she hasn’t been published yet), and though I’m not against name repetition I didn’t want two main characters sharing the same name.

I played around with Julie, which I got from Jewel, but I didn’t like it either. Eventually, I settled on Juliana, which I still didn’t like until book two of the series. The name felt out of place on her during the first book, but I realized that it was because part of her backstory included her not using the name for ten years. The name was foreign to her. After she left her life with the Dires behind, the name fit her better because she was allowed to be herself instead of a slave. Now I adore her. She’s one of my favorite characters.

If you want to get serious, the name of a character has no meaning other than the meaning you apply to it. Such as when Shakespeare started, “What’s in a name? Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?” 

Yes. If a rose was called a tiger it would not affect the actual physical attributes or makeup of the flower. Names are man-made. Humankind created names to tell things apart. Names are symbols. They symbolize what or who we are referring to.

Etymology is a guilty pleasure of mine. At one point in my life, I wanted to be a linguist but a linguistic degree wasn’t what I ended up with. I graduated with an English literature degree. If you’re not familiar with the term, Etymology is the study of words. It’s understanding where a word came from, how it was created, how it’s evolved over the years, and what meanings have been applied to it. I find that kind of stuff fascinating and it plays a huge role in how I name my characters. I will go onto baby name sites and type in “Latin-based baby boy names” or “Name meaning from the glades”. 

A lot of names come from places. Possibly one of the most fun examples of this is Torpenhow Hill in England. I came upon this gem while scrolling through social media and then did my research because I couldn’t get over how funny this hill’s name is.

Torpenhow Hill originally belonged to the Welsh. The story goes that when the Saxons came into the area they asked the Welsh, “What’s the name of that spot?” I can imagine them pointing at the hill, trying to work around their language barrier to identify landmarks. 

The Welsh, who were most likely confused by the said language barrier, told the Saxons, “Pen” which means “hill” in Welsh.

The Saxons were like, “Oh, okay. Pen. So we’ll call it Torpen”...Tor was the Saxon word for “hill” so they probably thought they were naming the hill “Hill Pen”, but they ended up naming it “Hill Hill”. 

Later on, the Norse showed up and the same type of process occurred, resulting in the hill being renamed “Torpen Haugr” or “Hill Hill Hill”.

Then the English showed up and tacked on their word for “hill”, plus changed the spelling of “Haugr” to fit their language, thinking the hill should be called Torpenhow Hill…resulting in the hill being named, “Hill Hill Hill Hill”.

That was a fun little example of how language barriers can affect the creation of names, but names can also develop another way. Take, for instance, my given name. 

My dad chose to name me Ashley because he liked the name, but the etymology of the name goes way back. Ashley was originally an adjective. It was used to describe a place, usually a town or village, that had a large quantity of ash trees.

Before surnames, people referred to each other as the place they were from. For instance, Robin Hood was Robin of Loxley. So Ashley became a ‘clan name’, such as Garrett of Ashley. Which then developed into a surname like Garrett Ashley, because as language evolves we shorten things. Then somewhere down the line, someone said, “Ashley is a good name for a boy.” Let’s name our son “Ashley”. Then, “Let’s name our daughter Ashley”. Thus, Ashley became a common first name.

I mentioned Matthew Hex above. When I created him I didn’t realize that his last name had developed from the rumor of his ancestors being witches. They performed spells, someone said they did hexes and it became a family name. Xander’s name came from his clan. Juliana’s full name is Juliana of the Glades, but it changed to Juliana of the Wasted Glades when a tragedy struck her homeland.

Because of how fluid symbolism is, language is fluid, and therefore names are fluid. Which allows parents and creators to play around with the names they give their children and their art. So instead of Crew you might have Crue (originally coined by Motley Crue, who got their name from being called a motley crew. Don’t believe me? Read their book The Dirt.) Instead of Camryn, you might have Kamryn. You could have Dillon or Dylan. Jayden or Jaydn. Jamie or Jayme.

I love using unique spellings for my characters’ names. I think it helps set them apart. However, when you are choosing a name for your character you need to keep in mind their culture. 

My main character in Extinction on the Prairie is a Nebraska girl. She bleeds Husker red and grew up on fish fries. Despite her parents being scientists, giving her some out-of-the-world name like Lexicona or Hera didn’t fit the world she was born into. I searched for popular baby girl names in the 90s and early 2000s, resulting in the name Brea. Brea is technically short for Briana, but I didn’t like the longer version. So, I simply went with Brea. Funny enough, if you search the etymology of the name Brea it means “hill”.

Hills have a rich linguistic history. Probably because they’re landmarks. 

When naming places, you should ask yourself what kind of land it is. In fantasy literature adding “shire” to the end of town names is super popular so I named a town in Morzania Wroughtshire. “Wrought” because the word makes me think of trade work, like blacksmithing, and it’s a trade work run port. Shire because, well, popularity…and it sounds good.

The Glades of Morzania were named because they were a wet prairie land primarily used for farming. The name changed to Wasted Glades when the wetland dried up into a sort of sandy environment. 

If you are naming a small town, I can tell you that in rural Nebraska many towns are named after their founding families. The town I live in was named after a place in Sweden where many of the town’s original settlers came from.

My favorite thing to do on road trips is to pay attention to the names of creeks. Creeks have the weirdest, most simple names. I’ve seen Big Bear Creek and Little Bear Creek. Most likely these were named by explorers who just happened to see bears by the creek. Massacre Creek, in Nebraska, was named after a legitimate massacre between the Europeans and Indigenous people.

How about a slightly inappropriate example? Monuments get their names from what they look like. Here in Nebraska, we have Carhenge, named after Stonehenge because it’s a replica of Stonehenge but made out of cars (Don’t judge us. We’re not weird. We’re quirky). Chimney Rock…oh, Lord, this monument…at first you think, “Oh, it’s named that because it looks like a chimney”. Yeah, it looks like a chimney to us now, but its original name, given to it by the Indigenous tribes of Nebraska, was Elk’s Penis.

The day that monument was named, I bet it was by a bunch of Indigenous boys giggling on a trip. Elk Penis…sounds like a name a middle school boy would give it. It makes me laugh, though. 

Though I don’t recommend naming your fictional monuments after animal body parts (or human body parts, for that matter), do think about what kind of landscaping and animals are around them. Ask yourself, “What does this monument look like?” and “What historical events happened here?”

Character names are important for every story but place names are crucial in any world-building you do. If you are creating an entirely new world, do your research, make a rough map, and make sure your locations have names that make sense.