The Elf Name Generator is originally specialized in making fantasy elf names, mainly aimed at the RPG gaming community. But every year in December users from around the globe use the fantasy elven names for real Christmas elf names.

And it’s actually quite naturally I think. It is indeed very fun coming up with your own elf name for Santas small and faithful helpers. And at the elf name generator you’ll find lot’s of inspiration to making you own Christmas elven names. Just take the fantasy elements from the name and combine it with some old Christmas season nouns and holiday expressions and you are good to go.

Still several weeks till Christmas, so go visit the Christmas elf name generator and make you own cool Christmas elver names.

The feature is incorporated into the web page of the business name generator, so you just need to click the random name you wanna perform a check on. Very easy and simple to use.

The domain check at my business name generator is performed with help from www.GoDaddy.com, the big international domain and hosting company.

I have made an affiliate agreement with them, and have been granted permission to perform domain availability checks through one of their domain availability check forms.

Domain availability check to all random names

There’s no reason to add an availability check to all my random name generators. If you are looking for a cool screen name you are probably not interested in buying the corresponding domain name.

Instead I have added the domain check tool to all of the name generators, where it is relevant to perform such a check. That means the feature is added to all of my business line name generators like the company name generator, the code and project name generators and the product and brand generators.

Further more I have added the new domain check feature to the guild and clan name generators and finally the band name gen. Many clans have their own websites and all serious bands also have it.

Domain availability check. What took you so long?

This pretty obvious feature was delayed by a couple of reasons. First of all because of the economy in it. If you wanna perform a check up against the professional whois databases you have to pay a rather steep price for it. Meaning that only pros in the domain and hosting business can actually afford it.

There are some free services out there and it is possible to web scrape some of them. But every time I ran into problems with very long waits.  Most of the free the services are simply too slow to reply to the request. And waiting 5-10 seconds is not acceptable in a modern web application.

Get you own domain names

If this got you curious you can try out the new feature at my Domain name generator.  But be aware that you might find some cool domains for your business and projects you just need to have.

The focus is to create a collection of free online tools to help creating catchy names for all conceivable business areas. So the business name generators is a website where you can find help and inspiration when it comes to naming all business related projects.

From the launch the business names generators features 4 different business generators:

1. Business name generator – ideas and suggestion for naming your business.
2. Company name generator – more specialized tool aimed at naming a company.
3. Project name generator – a generator coming up with code name for naming your projects.
4. Brand name generator – creating catchy brand names.

And many more tools are soon to follow.

Portrait of a business name generator

The Brand Name Generator is a typical example of the tools at the business names generators. It makes random suggestion for brand names.The brand name generator uses word lists with words and syllables known from eg. science, biology, math, economy etc. These words are handpicked because of their generic nature and suitability for making modern brands.

The words from the lists are then combined together with random functions. Functions that decide which words and syllables to use as the base names and which should be pre- or suf-fixes in the final brand name.

To make surprising and creative brand names, the random algorithms are programmed to also make the less obvious word combinations. It sometimes leads to inappropriate, bad or even stupid brand suggestions. But it’s a deliberate strategy to make the brands and business names more interesting. And if you don’t like the name it’s extremely easy to just generate another one.

Business Generator Design

Interface design

As always the most important for user interface design is to keep things simple. So the style is minimalistic and with no disturbing elements. A clear visual hierarchy makes it’s easy to grasp the website and it’s core functionality in a split second.

A distinct button immediately makes it clears where to start name generation. Result of the generation is written i a huge bold type helping to keep the users focus concentrated on the generation area.

And of course all the names generated are saved to a list, so you won’t miss any good ideas, just because you click the button too fast.

Generator programming

As always the generators is programmed in JavaScript. It’s simply the most user friendly way to do things. JavaScript is blazing fast and new names are generated with absolutely no waits, because the JavaScript is executed locally in the user browser.

All JavaScript is native and hand written to make loadtimes even smaller. JavaScript frameworks and libraries like jQuery, Moo Tool etc are smart and convinient,  and they do make programming faster. But no matter how optimized they are, they requires extra loads and http requests, and they will add to the load time of a page. So doing it yourself is both faster and more fun.

Thank you so much for this wonderful script! I’ve been searching for a while for a script that came with easy instructions. The script is going to liven up my geofiction project. However, I was wondering if you are willing to also share the how-to / code for creating the list of names from the generator?

A great idea. A save list add some very cool functionality to the name generator and I use it on all my name generators. You can see an example here at my Business Name Generator.

The save list funtion

To save the names generated by the name generator script we simply just add the names to the HTML . It’s called DOM manipulation because we are altering the DOM (document object model). The DOM is in short all the HTML in a website. When your are using JavaScript to change the DOM it is done locally in the users browser and on the fly.So the the results are shown instantly.

There’s no waits and new request send to the server. But enough talk. Lets’ get down to it. Here’s the complete script to make  a save list:

function save(){
	var elem = document.createElement("div");
	elem.setAttribute("class", "namelistName");
	var nameTextNode = document.createTextNode(name);
	elem.appendChild(nameTextNode);
	document.getElementById("savepoint").appendChild(elem);
}

The script is very short and it’s actually also pretty simple. Here’s what’s going on:

In line one we define the save function
In line 2 we create a new div-tag and save it in the variable named elem
In line 3 we add a class atribute to the div-tag
In line 4 we create a text node which holds the created name for us.  We use the variable ‘name’ which is not declared in this function. It is declared in the name generator script. Se below. *
In line 5 we append our text node to the div element
In line 6 we append our newly created div-tag to a div tag with the id=”savepoint” in the HTML. So in order to make this work you have to create an empty div tag with the id=”savepoint”, where you want the list to show up in your HTML page.

*IMPORTANT: In the save function we use the  same variable:  ‘name’ as in the name generator function.  In the name generator script the ‘name’ variable is declared inside the name-generator function. We need to place this declaration outside of the function to make it a global variable that is available to both the name generator function and the above save function.

So when your are combing the save list script with the name generator script it should look like this:

<script type="text/javascript">var name;
function generator(){
      // Add your own words to the wordlist. Be carefull to obey the showed syntax
      var adjectives = ["Cool","Masked","Bloody","Lame"];
      ... etc.
}
function save(){
      var elem = document.createElement("div");
      ... etc.
}
</script>

Now the name variable is global, and available in all JavaScript functions on this page.

Here you can see how you  Make a name generator.

The example in this guide is taken from my Random Name Generator, which makes random names based on American name lists with the 1000 most popular boy names, girl names and surnames.

Random names script

Here’s the part of the script that handles the randomness:

var n1m = parseInt(Math.random() * boyName.length);
var n1mex = parseInt(Math.random() * boyName.length);
var n1f = parseInt(Math.random() * girlName.length);
var n1fex = parseInt(Math.random() * girlName.length);
var n2 = parseInt(Math.random() * surname.length);
var n2ex = parseInt(Math.random() * surname.length);

var boyName = boyname[n1m];
var boyNameEx = boyName[n1mex];
var girlname = girlName[n1f];
var girlNameEx = girlName[n1fex];
var surname = surname[n2];
var surnameEx = surname[n2ex];

var n3 = parseInt(Math.random()* 100);

if( n3 <= 35){
  name = boyName + " "  + surname;
}else if(n3 > 35 && n3 <= 45 ){
  name = boyName +  " "  + boyNameEx + " " + surname;
}else if(n3 > 45 && n3 <= 48 ){
  name = boyName +  " "  + girlNameEx + " " + surname;
}else if(n3 > 48 && n3 <= 50 ){
  name = boyName +  " "  + surnameEx + " " + surname;
}else if(n3> 50 && n3 <= 85 ){
  name = girlName + " "  + surname;
}else if(n3 > 85 && n3 <= 95 ){
  name = girlName +  " "  + girlNameEx + " " + surname;
}else if(n3 > 95 && n3 <= 98 ){
  name = girlName +  " "  + boyNameEx + " " + surname;
}else{
  name = girlNameEx +  " "  + surnameEx + " " + surname;
}

In line 1-6 we make 6 random numbers. We make a random number for male, female and surnames. And then we make an extra one, for each category. We do that to be able to random names with random middle names.

In line 8-13 we find the random random names and the extra names for the middle names.

In line 15 things starts to get interesting. Here we make the random number, which is the heart in the complex random algorithm. I multiply this number with 100 to make it easier to work with. It makes it easy to convert our randomness numbers into percents.

From line 17 I start to build the random name, and it’s actually pretty self explanatory, what going on. If the number n3 is less than 35 the name will be made from a boy name plus a surname. If the n3 is between 35 and 45 we add the extra boy name as a middle name and so on.

So the above algorithm gives these random names:

• 35% boy name + surname
• 10% boy name + boy name as middlename + surname
• 3% boy name + girl name as middlename + surname
• 2% boy name + surname as middlename + surname
• 35% girl name + surname
• 10% girl name + girl name as middlename + surname
• 3% girl name + boy name as middlename + surname
• 2% girl name + surname as middlename + surname

All in all there’s 50% male names and 50% female names.

And it the process we generate a variation in the female and male names. Obviously much more complex than in my basic name generator tutorials, where we just use one random name and combine it with another name.

Even more complexity

But we can make it even more complex, by adding more checks to the above algorithmic randomness rule.

Let’s say we don’t want too long name combinations. We could something like this:

...else if(n3 > 85 && n3 <= 95 ){
  if(girlName.length + surname.length > 13){
    name = girlName +  " "  + girlNameEx + " " + surname;
  }else{
    name = girlName +  " " + surname;
  }
}...

With this example we only ad a middle name to the girl name if the length of the first and the second is less than 13 characters long.

Only your imagination sets the limit for the complexity of your algorithmic randomness rules.

Name generator tutorials

You can find the corresponding name tutorials here:

How to make a name generator. In this name generator tutorial, you’ll find everything you need to know to make a basic name generator.

Name generator script. In the name generator script I have made all the basic work for you. You just need to a little add water to personalize the name generator.

First idea was a superhero game release or a super hero festival of some sort. And it took a little research before a superhero search on twitter revealed, that all the superhero name fuss was cause by the release of the upcoming superhero movie: Green Hornet. Green Hornet is having world premiere at January the 14.

Everybody wants a superhero name

Funny how a sudden hype about movie like Green Hornet, can cause such a peak in interest for getting superhero names.

Well, I think the superhero name generator is well prepared to take up the challenge of creating fresh and unique superhero names for everybody. I mean green hornet isn’t exactly the most impressing superhero name I ever has seen.

Well, good luck with the movie, if you are a Marvel and superhero enthusiast. And remember you can get a sneak peek and previews of the Green Hornet Movie at the official Sony site.

This December I got a mail from Erika, a German girl who is into role playing.

Hallo web master.

I love role playing and have been looking for a good fairy name generator for quite a while. You have made a lot of cool generators but not a fairy name generator. It would be great if you made one, as I need some new ideas for good fairy names.

kind regards
Erika

I don’t know much about fairies or fairy names, but not sure if I wanna start all over with a new generator. Fairies are fantasy creatures so basically some good RPG fantasy names should also make some good and cool fairy names.

Fantasy fairy name generator

If the fairy names you are looking for are fantasy related,  just use my Fantasy Name Generator to make  fantasy fairy names. These fairy names will be 100% random and fantasy based, so using the generator as a fairy name generator will make genuine fantasy names like:

• Fayne
• Akara
• Safize

And combinations of these and other likewise names. The big advantage with the fantasy based fairy names is that they are usable in cross cultural correlations. The work just as good for German, Danish or American fairy names, because they lack of specific linguistic preferences.

With the fantasy generator you won’t find the usual little girl cute fairy names with common language names like blossom, Elise or fleur. Neither you’ll find the Disney inspired almost sicking cute fairy names.

Fairy names with random vowels

As an alternative you can also make random fairy names just by changing the letters in known words randomly.  If you for example change the vowels, fairy could be feora and maria could become myrii. Myrii feora sounds like a pretty cool fairy name to me.

This method is very easy to use your self  or you can use this small tool to change random vowels, if you wanna do it automatically and totally random.

Make you own fairy name generator

If you are not satisfied with my fantasy fairy names, but rather want those sweet and cute fairy names the solution is easy. You just need to make your own generator. Not as hard as it sound, no it’s actually quite easy.

In this article I’ll show you how to make a name generator. At the same page you can also find a complete script to download. Just insert you own funny, sweet or cute fairy names in the scripts word lists and you got a complete generator up and running, nicely presented in a fully finished and styled HTML web page. The script is public domain, so you can do whatever you want to do with it. Good luck.

More about fairies

Fairy dancing by Nils Blommer 1850

According to Wikepedia a fairy (also some times called faery, faerie, fay, fae)  is a type of mythical being or legendary creature, a form of spirit, often described as metaphysical, supernatural or preternatural.

The word fairy derives from Middle English faierie (also fayerye, feirie, fairie), a direct borrowing from Old French faerie meaning the land, realm, or characteristic activity (i.e. enchantment) of the legendary people of folklore and romance called faie or fee. This derived ultimately from Late Latin fata (one of the personified Fates, hence a guardian or tutelary spirit).

Fairies resemble various beings of other mythologies, though even folklore that uses the term fairy offers many definitions. Sometimes the term describes any magical creature, including goblins or gnomes: at other times, the term only describes a specific type of more ethereal creature.

Read more about fairies and fairy names at Wikipediea

Also check this list of fairy names and their meanings.

Google Analytics shows that the daily entrances to the elf generator  doubles from  4-500 to over 1000 in late November and December.  Google web master tool confirms this trend in searches for elf names and other elf related stuff.

My statistics also shows that  more users than usual are sharing the elf names with friends at Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarkings sites.

Actually, I am somewhat puzzled by this development in December. The increasing in searches is quite self evident.  But my elf names are based in the fantasy universe and not aimed at being Christmas elf names. But maybe confusion  is due to lack of knowledge to the American tradition for Christmas names. In Denmark typical Christmas elf names derives from local folklore and nouns related to Christmas combined with good old fashion first names. A Typical Danish Elf names  could be Peter Porridge or Sven Spruce.

Well, try Elf Names yourself and tell me what you think. Can they be used for Christmas Elf names in your country or are they totally nonsense?

• Brands as company names
• Personal company names
• Descriptive company names
• Naming with acronyms, contractions or hidden meanings
• Combined names for companies

Brands as company names

Using brands as company names takes a lot more effort to make the customers understand the companies business areas. The company name  may be chosen because of some cool pronouncing, spelling and sound of a the word.

When choosing brands as cool company names a Company Name Generator can be of great help. My Company name generator makes cool and trendy tech names for you business. The company name generator can make you discover new ways of naming and might help to think creatively and out of the box.

Company name with no description needs more branding to make customers, clients and business partners understand what your companies line of business is. Branding can be done with advertising, but also by adding descriptive tag lines to your name. Texdex – High quality business supplies.

Some well known companies using brands like names:

• Nike
• Addidas
• Coca Cola
• Blaupunkt

Personal company names

Personal company names are often based on the name of the founders of the company. But it can also be a random chosen name just to add some personality and maybe even the creditability a family name can add to your corporation. Just as with the brands name the personal names doesn’t send any signals about what your business area really is. So the strategies when promoting it will be pretty much the same as with the brands. A personal name needs a good tag line and some massive advertising to make the name recognized by costumers and business partners.

Some famous personal company names are:

• McDonald
• Heineken
• Bang & Olufsen
• Wells Fargo
• Chrysler

Descriptive company names

Descriptive company names holds a description of the line of business. This is a good strategy for a upcoming company. Not the smae need for branding and advertising.

Here’s some good examples:

• Financial times
• EA Games (EA =  Electronic Arts)
• Sun Microsystems
• Scandinavian Airlines
• Micron Technology

Acronyms, contractions or hidden meanings

Using acronyms, contractions and hidden meanings are  very common and widely used methods, when it comes to naming companies. Just like the brands the names need to be easy to spell and pronounce. In acronyms or contractions the hidden meaning comes from the words behind the name. But a hidden meaning could also be found in another language. Often some of the classic languages like Latin or Greek. These classic languages represents tradition and signalize a scientific or cultural approach.

Easy to find lots of good examples:

• IBM  (Acronym for International Business Machines)
• Fiat (Acronym meaning Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Italian Automobile Factory of Torino))
• 37signals (From the 37 radiotelescope signals identified by astronomer Paul Horowitz as potential messages from extraterrestrial intelligence)
• Volvo (Latin for I roll)
• Lego (Contraction of the Danish words: Leg Godt (play well). But Lego also means “Put together” in Latin)
• Infosys (Contraction of Information Systems)

Combined company names

Combined company names are name that use combinations of any of the above methods. This is also a very good strategy. You combine the advantages of a cool sounding brand and the easy recognizability of your business area.

• Ford Motor Company
• A&M Records
• Zend Technologies
• Mazda Motor Corporation

Cool company name resources

Company Name Generator. Cool company name generator. A great tool to get creative and random ideas for company names. The company generator saves all the generated name to a list very easy to copy and save.

List of company names. Wikipedias huge list of existing company names

How to make good business names. Blog article about different techniques to making good business names.

List of companies named after people. List of corporations named with or after personal names.

The essence of a good business names

• Are easy to remember
• Are easy to pronounce
• Looks good in writing
• Give positive associations to customers
• Distinguish you from your competitors

The business name generator

A business name generator is a great place to start, when you are trying to make good business names. It can ignite the creative process and in a short time give you a lot of different ideas and suggestions to work on with.

Of course a business name generator can’t come up with that perfect business name, but it’s a great tool in the brainstorming phase, and it really can help you think out of the box.

4 easy steps to the good business name

1. Brainstorming

In the brainstorm all ideas are good ideas. Write all the suggestions down to get as many name as possibles to choose from. Even stupid name suggestions are valuable because you can associate over them, and the associations can lead to new and more serious suggestions.

It’s a good idea to let a brainstorm run over several days or weeks to get time to explore more associations.  And it is also beneficial to brainstorm in different situations. At the traditional business meeting, during a walk in the park, over a lunch, during workout etc. The broader variety in the settings the more variation in the final ideas.

In the brainstorming phase a business name generator can be a very handy tool to get new inspiration and to help loosing up on the creative process.

2. Refining and filtering names

The next step is to choose from all the suggestions and ideas coming from the brainstorms. It’s is time to get rid of all the bad names. Check if the names easy to remember, spell, sounds good and is easy to pronounce. If you are going global it’s important to also thinking of these factors in foreign languages.

And it’s also time to take the initial research a little further. Is their any hidden meanings in the business names suggestions? Any Embarrassing spellings or abbreviations? Does the name  contain profanities or offensive undertones? Does abbreviations and acronyms look all right? And does the business name avoid implied associations with organizations and people  is not connected with?

Also remember to use Google to check, what results you get on your best business names ideas.

3. Check domain name availability

Next step is to check the domain name availability. Not much idea in choosing a name if you can’t get the corresponding domain name.

If the domain name is available you also need to check if your business name is already in use. Especially in your country and region, if you have a local company. The easiest method is to put your business name idea in quotation marks and do a Google search.  If Google doesn’t come up with anything then you should remember to check your local business register.

4. User testing

Finally you need to test your business names on potentially business partners and customers. A user test is extremely important, because the business name you have chosen might give other people some completely different associations and feelings than they give you. The worst case scenario is of course that go on line with a business name that sends completely  wrong signals.

If your business is international it is of course important also to check if the name doesn’t carry any profanities, insults or ridiculous meanings in the languages of any of the countries you operate in.

Good business naming resources

Business name generator. Inspiration and ideas to good business names. The Business name generator is a very easy to use and can really make you help think out of the box.

Brainstorming techniques. Description of some good brainstorming methods.

How to name a business. Tips to business naming from U.S. government.

Business registration in the U.S. Official business registration in the United States.

Guide to making Cool company names. A guide that describe different strategies to making cool company names.