Writer's Resource: Advanced Character Name Tools

As a follow-up to Stacy's post about choosing character names by popularity, I wanted to share one of my favorite new tools. I've posted about the Baby Name Wizard website before, but they recently made their advanced name finder tools free (you just have to register).

My favorite is the Expert Name Finder. It lets you select a whole bunch of different parameters to narrow down your name choices.

Here's an example using my current work-in-progress. For the main character, I wanted a boy's name that was fairly common in the US, and one that suggested intelligence and youth. I also didn't want it to start with the letters S, H, or L, since I have character names starting with each of those letters already.

Here's what my search looked like:

And here are my results:

This gives me lots of names to choose from. I especially like Aaron, Quinn, and Terrence for this character.

The advanced features also include a name matchmaker, where you can enter in a name you like and it will give you similar suggestions, and a neat tool called NameVoyager that gives popularity graphs, similar to the ones Stacy mentioned in her post.

With these tools, naming characters is a snap!