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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by moebiustales@lemmy.world to c/perchance@lemmy.world

I've made a generator to make plausible names for American characters based on their decade of birth.

perchance.org/us-names

You can pick any decade from the 1920s to the 2010s, and get it to generate a forename or a full name for a man or a woman born in that decade. There's also a surname generator based on 2010 data. Unlike a lot of name generators, it doesn't simply pick from a list of equally likely choices, the chances are weighted.

The forenames are chosen from the 200 most popular forenames for people born in that decade (according to the Social Security Administration), weighted by their relative popularity. So for the 2010 girls, for example, Emma (the most popular name) is 12 times more likely to be picked than Izabella (the 200th).

Similarly, the surnames are the most common 1000 surnames from the 2010 census, weighted for popularity from Smith to the 70-times-less-common Archer.

No attempt is made to match asian or hispanic forenames and surnames, so you can still get some fairly unlikely combinations, but it may help stem the endless tide of Elaras and Rachels.

Use it as-is to generate a name for a character manually, or incorporate it into your own generators. There are separate lists for male and female forenames or for full names for each decade, and one for the surnames, all documented on the generator's page.

I hope people find this useful. I'd love to see it added to the list of useful generators.

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[-] moebiustales@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Thank you. I'd be happy to do other versions for other countries - the limiting factor is getting the data on the relative popularity of names. Most countries aren't as obliging in that regard as the US.

If you're looking for a straight "random name from country X" generator, without the weighting by popularity or birth decade, then I recommend https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/ . Pick "Real Names" from the menu across the top, then choose the continent and country (and sometimes time period) you're after.

I've not done it myself, but if you need a particular set of names from that site as a perchance generator, it's not difficult to reverse engineer their javascript to derive a list that you could put into Perchance. For personal use only, of course.

this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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Perchance - Create a Random Text Generator

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