Meaningful names

[Duplicitous Dame]

Ah, naming. A joy as well as a curse. I like to call it the bane of my existence because I can take *forever* naming a character sometimes.

 

Nahare is my main character. She's a Miqo'te, so her full tribal name is X'nahare Rahz. Her heritage is from the Lynx tribe, and I liked the way Nahare sounded, so it stuck. It's pronounced "na-hah-ray." However, she hates Seeker tradition and only introduces herself as Nahare. She did recently become married, so her name is now Nahare Mergrey. 

 

As for my Elezen, he's Lucien Chevalier. Lucien means "light" and he's my Chaotic Good character. Chevalier means "knight" or "chivalrous man." My third character is Y'tahli Ashake, a tribal Seeker. She hails from the Jaguar tribe, and again, I liked the way Tahli sounded, so I chose it.

 

Really, I adhered to the naming conventions for all of my characters with the exception of Nahare. That woman likes to buck tradition and go against the grain as much as possible. Sometimes I can be silly with my names, but I save that for when I'm not roleplaying. Roleplaying will always have serious names for me.

[Nero]

When I select a name for a character, I have exactly two factors in mind: if the name is phonetically pleasing, and aesthetically pleasing. So it has to sound good when being mentioned and look good on text. Rarely do I ever assign a name that has any inherent or relevant meaning--at the risk of sounding pretentious, I would rather the names grow into their own meaning as a representation of the character and having the character define the name, rather than having the name define the character.

[Zoya]

As some others in this thread, naming takes a long while for me as I think about a good name. It's supposed to be short, meaningful (to me) and good looking (to me) on screen.

 

(Spoiler to make the post shorter for those not interested)

 

Now, V'zoya Jinx.

 

I started with the "main" name Zoya, which is a derivation from the greek Zoe meaning life. Great fit for the lively girl I'm trying (and probably failing) to portray her as! And it still sounds nice if you add the Vah-tribe tag. The spelling canonically is a corruption of Zojha, which was inspired by the Aftcastle NPC L'zuhjha, a change I made as an allusion to the thief in Trine, as Zoya happens to be affiliated with the rogue's guild.

 

This also leads to the choice of the vulture tribe. For one, the guild already has one, so it gives her more reason to stay there, for another, her model bears a faint resemblance to V'kebbe (Same eye/mouth shape, tail and face choice), for yet another, it suits what is essentially a stray cat, as vultures are scavengers and due to financial issues she relies on scavenging more often than she'd like. It is a constant up and down with that, which plays into the last name.

 

Jinx is a nickname whose meaning most probably already know. I naturally have made a nice little backstory to it, but I reckon people who endure RP with me a couple times can already guess where it comes from, as it's an ongoing theme. The idea here was to create a befitting nickname that's in line with "Underfoot" and "the Stray" from the rogue's guild. And, to avoid making up a father.

 

So yeah...I'm usually putting research and thought into my character's names, even though it might not always seem like it.

 

[Klynzahr]

I chose Evangeline because it sounded classy.

 

 

That's funny, I had always assumed that you chose her name for it's connection to the word evangelist, which can be defined as a person marked by evangelical enthusiasm for or support of any cause.

 

Klynzahr's name was chosen primarily for it's sound, and it's irony.

 

Klynzahr translates literally to Small Tears, which in my head reads as a sort of good luck phrase, implying that she will shed few tears in her life. So far it's not working out for her and Klynzahr has become a solemn, somewhat grouchy character.

 

.... but the real hilarity ensues, when other characters shorten her name to Klyn. They are essentially staring waaaaaaaaaaay up at this 7'2" woman and calling her 'Short'.

:lol:

[freyaliesel]

My characters have names that I found aesthetically pleasing.

 

However, I named my Roegadyn's chocobo "Guolaent" which translates to "Mighty Duck"

[Kimikimi]

Originally my character was a Miqo'te named Katsu Toko, A sort of play on words with Cat being in her name, but it wasn't really meant to be meaningful at all.

 

Rin Qestir is a little more meaningful, Rin being the japanese name for "Bell" or the sound of a bell. Which is an odd name for a Auri who cannot speak. So in a sense, Rin is a silent bell of sorts. And I always thought that was a bit of a cool little thing about her name.

[Kellach Woods]

THE ORIGINS OF KELLACH'S NAME.

 

First, I looked up a unisex name - Kelly fit the bill. However, Kelly as a "medievalish" name? Nah son. I wanted to show that regardless of their standing - the land where Kell came from was still relatively backwater. So I attempted to reverse-engineer the linguistic evolution of Kelly which went something like :

 

Kelly > Kelley > Kelleh > Kellah > Kellak.

 

The ch is just to make the written portion look good.

 

Woods was just timed to have a last name like thing, except I wanted to avoid the pigeonholing usually associated with the occupation names (Smith, etc.) to show the fact that they have to perform multiple tasks on the farm in order to survive - instead concentrating on where the family originated (Woods, Rivers, etc.) as possible last names.

[EkheiBalduin]

Ya know, I never really think about things like that. I just kind of fart around with names until it fits. I became curious about the surname I chose for E'khei after reading everyone's posts, though.

 

E'khei is just Miqo'te naming convention stuff ... BUT ...

 

Balduin or Baldwin is Anglo-Saxon and Old German in origin. It means "bold friend". So, something like E'khei the Bold Friend or something. Eh ... it fits in certain scenarios.

[Momoka]

Therese I named after a french saint, all my elezen have french names that I like. Her full name is Therese Celeste Orycia, and Theresa (or therese) is my favourite girls name hands down. Celeste is  my second favourite. IDK what Orycia means, I didnt make it up, this character was made to be a family member to my SO's main. Luminous Moon was named after the fact that shes stark white, with blue hair and white eyes. Also the Moon is my favourite thing ever.

 

 

And Lothaire is just a very masculine french name. His surname is Beauchemin, the surname of my close friend from Quebec.

[K'nahli]

I just looked around my room and saw my half-eaten breakfast bearclaw danish and named myself after that. Better than stapler I guess.

 

Saga just because it was an old norse girls name I liked that still has modern usage as a word.

 

Dragoon got named after my favorite character in Wakfu, Evangelyne and a video game I liked a lot, Recettear.

 

Seseto Seto was just named after Seto Kaiba because that's her gimmick.

 

My eyes immediately went looking under your avatar in search of: Half-eaten'Danish Bearclaw ;

 

With exception to Hyuran names and parallels for the same race in other games which are obviously based on existing ones, all of mine are simply made up in my head after taking some time to sample various sounds, haha ; That's why I was secretly annoyed to see names bearing a striking resemblance to K'nahli's. (Q'nahli, anyone?) *fumes* !

 

In this case of my lalafel whose name is supposed to rhyme in according with the lore, I deliberately choose something that sounded fruity like a drink and somewhat cute!

[Kurt S.]

Kurt Steel, well yanno...i mean Steel because eventually it was just hard to break him. Or rather it looked that way but he had beem broken into a variety of pieces.

Eventually, just like how you can work to shape steel into whatever, he sort of just became 'fluid' in a sense. There was no real him but rather just following the mold he was previously left in. Only a scant core traits carried over each time he was asked to don another form, name and be another person.

 

Nah was because I just finished binge playing FEAwakening. Amariyo because well...the generator said so. Eventually some people just blended the name and came up with something like Namaryo.

 

All the other names I came up with either had their first names predetermined. Francesca, Ramomo, Batu, etc. Then took the first thing the generator shoved in my face.

 

Then there was Kihl. U'kihl Tia/ Kihl Amalle. Back then I thought it was witty making it sound like kill em all.

[Cliodhna Eoghan]

names usually take awhile for me. like most that already replied; i tend to look at the character that i'm trying to flesh out and give a name that goes with at least once aspect of them.

granted, when i first first made clio; she was briefly in another rp (forum based but typical/open generic fantasy setting) when i brought her here; her father was vastly influenced by gradania lifestyle and ignoring naming customs for highlanders; named her himself (to her mother's disdain...)

 

cliodhna (pronounced "KLEE-u-na" ) Possibly means "shapely" in Irish Gaelic. In Irish legend this was the name of a beautiful goddess. She fell in love with a mortal named Ciabhan and left the Land of Promise with him, but when she arrived on the other shore she was swept to sea by a great wave.

 

being the typical doting father type, newlyn was overjoyed to find he had a little girl and wanted a pretty sounding name for her. something delicate and sounding to fit a poised lady.

 

eoghan (pronounced "YO-in" ) Possibly means "born from the yew tree" in Irish, though it is possibly derived from EUGENE. It was borne by several legendary or semi-legendary Irish figures, including a son of Niall of the Nine Hostages.

 

like his own name, newlyn adopted a different last name than the one he had prior to leaving Ala Mhigo so naturally; he passed that along as well instead of the more traditional concept of letting cliodhna pick her own last name when she came of age to do so.

 

actually her name has been a minor source of hangups for her ic. she's rather picky about who gets to call her "clio" and up until the wedding rolled around, she was having a hard decision on changing her last name to "mynhier" or leaving it as it was; she finally came to a decision and has gotten a tad more relaxed about who can call her clio but it's still not an open nickname for anyone (ic, ooc i don't care )

[Altitis Acquired]

Vachir means Thunderbolt and was picked from a list of Mongolian names. As I found out, it can be both male and female, as most of those names on said list. I just thought it sounded cool. ^^

[Zelmanov]

Orrin from greek origins means "Man of the Mountains" which is fitting since he was picked up from the wreckage of a razed town in Coerthas and adopted, essentially a child born of the mountain, akin to Moses being "drawn from the river"

 

Halgren comes from gibberish I put together, meant to mimic old elezen names akin to Thordan or Haldrath. I only found out LATER that it is a name in scandinavian countries (Hallgren, Halgren, Halgrin) and has no real meaning

[Ignacius]

I sometimes work backwards.  A good example was my WoW character.

 

I originally pulled a series of orcish names, intending to have a Night Elf that was aligned with the Horde (I was younger then).  I came up with the names Zumok and Zotaga.  I combined them into Zumoktaga and called it a day.  I transferred servers a few times, adding character traits and retconning my cheesier backstory and ended up making his name a lynchpin of this evolution.  That Zumoktaga was a Fel Night Elf, created as a sort of joke by the Burning Legion in Kalimdor as a baby after the rest of his family was murdered.  He himself grew into a sort of roaming monster, one that terrorized later Horde members.  Even the humans who eventually captured him and broke his bloodlust knew him by the Orcish name they gave him, Zumok Taga, which I said in the Orcish language translated to Devil Face.  He then used that nickname, Devilface, as a callsign when working with his airborne military regiment (he was an Alliance paratrooper).

 

Orleans actually worked forward.  I didn't have much personality, but I picked the name from a French language site (I didn't like the randomly generated names).  Ignacius was the name of my character in FFXI, also taken from a name site.  Since I didn't have much to go on at first, I used a sort of New Orleans take to make him.  He turned into a gambler of good dress and polite, if seedy, mannerisms, with a tribal religion behind him.  That later went on to spawn my little FC my friends and I use, the Ghost Wolf Dancers (the tribe) and his later career as a smuggler and general criminal background.

[LadyCleriseaux]

I love getting in-depth about names! Usually it takes me a couple of hours and lots of scribbling down possible combinations to come up with a good one. 

 

Despite the fact that I RP a lore abiding Elezen her first name is Spanish. It is the Spanish feminine form of Noël. That's because I got the game for Christmas. Her surname "Cleriseaux" is a twist on the surname Clérisseau. This comes from the name of the French architect and artist Charles-Louis Clérisseau. I found this through one of friends who happens to be a student of architecture. She just happened to have some work about him, I saw the name and something just clicked. 

 

For my Raen I followed the naming conventions as much as I could. Her first name Izayoi can be translated at "16th night" or the night after a full moon. I liked the moon connotations and 16th is her IC birthday so it fit her perfectly. For her last name I did a bit of research in to more traditional Japanese names. I tried incorporating something that would make her whole name mean something but it didn't really work that way. I settled on Fujiwara which means 'Wisteria Plain' and it links to her homeland where a tree similar to wisteria grows perennially. It's also the name of the greatest clan in the Heian period of Japan. I intended her family to be quite important in their little village.

[TheLastCandle]

In 1.0, I played "Teveriel Anduin." It's a name I've used in several MUDs and MMOs over the years for various "elf" like characters. Teveriel isn't inspired by anything; I actually thought of it on the fly when trying to come up with a name for an elf. But "Anduin" is a river from Tolkien's Middle Earth.

 

Here in ARR, I wanted to follow the lore's naming conventions. I took the name "Navarre" from a real-world French surname, more specifically the character Etienne Navarre from the movie Ladyhawke. It's an old favorite.

 

"Yvelont" actually came from the name generator. I was playing with the name generator, landed on this one, and instantly loved it.

[Zhavi]

See, I tend to pick names with meanings, but then a month after creation I completely forget what the meanings are. Oh well. At least I can remember what streetrunner means!

[Eliane Dufresne]

My logic was simple but a bit clunky.

 

"Eliane" in French means "daughter of the sun". The sun being a star, and Ellie being an Astrologian, well...there you go. 8-)

[ChewableMorphine]

Prepare for underwhelming revelation:

 

Flynt -> flint -> a rock, also a really plain midwestern farmer name.

 

Reddard -> Red (Favorite color) + Eddard (Stark, despite me not even liking GoT, I just liked his name a lot.)

[Volk]

Edelweiss was simple - just a flower i think is neat:

 

 

it grows at high altitudes and is very sturdy. it is a flower, but its petals are thick and not delicate like many other flowers. I remembered that FFXIV mentions the edelweiss in a sideways manner through the rogue's guild. So I made this neat flower my character's name ooc and her pseudonym IC. Anyways, the highlander design I made for her has her hair is really light blonde with some near-white in it so it seemed like a good fit.

 

Her real name, Elsa Engstrom, is just patchwork. It could be lore bending or breaking bc I chose not to go the highlander epithet surname route, but I just prefer to name my characters that way.

 

--

 

Ameline Valtin, my late elezen, was random generated name - no special story or meaning there.

 

--

 

Beatrix Archer, my little midlander, is sort of a joke that i took too far. I thought it would be funny to make a Bea Arthur and just named her Beatrix Archer. It seemed midlander enough. Now I occasionally RP her or use her to tank pre-HW stuff where people dont fling poo at paladins

 

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EDIT: I forgot, i have this thing where every character I make must have a given and surname that equals 5 syllables when added together. Idk why, but it really makes it flow better.

 

Am-el-ine--Val-tin (3+2)

Be-a-trix--Ar-cher (3+2)

Ed-el-weiss--Eng-strom (3+2)

 

Some of my favourite names of others in the community share this even if they did not think to do it intentionally !

[murasaki]

The kanji for Yukari is 紫 , which can also be read as "murasaki", meaning purple / violet. Also commonly used to refer to the colour of dusk. (Example picture below)

She's a Raen Au Ra, so a name that references beauty and nature fits nicely with the lore of the race/clan

 

(Picture taken from this guy's blog)

[Syf]

Syf means muck, grime or dirt in Polish. Used it to emulate Mongolian names that are given to ward off and confuse evil spirits.

[Mia Moui]

My character's name doesn't have any specific meaning except that I like alliteration. Moui is a canon Keeper name, however.

 

But when it came time to choose a name for her chocobo, I did think about this a lot.  I eventually settled on Aiko which is Japanese for...well, it depends on the kanji.  I chose 愛幸 which (I think) means love and fortune.  Maybe love of fortune? That's okay but I hope it means love and good luck. But love of child is also possible with 

愛子 and that could be especially touching because of Mia's unfortunate experiences with the Coeurlclaw.

[FrigidChick]

If the game gives me the option of a surname, I usually use the surnames 'Zan', 'Love', or 'Drayton'...

 

Sylvie Zan 

Dare Zan

 

 

 

 I also have a habit of naming avatars after characters in video games,  shows I am currently watching, and random people.

 

Bertholdt Hoover

Dragonlady Une (my Dragonborn in Skyrim)

 

 

 

Other times, I name the character with a random thought in mind:

 

Pink Martini (crazy pink drink topped with cotton candy)

Olive Yuu (aka "I love you")

 

 

 

Most likely I name the character after my childhood drawings and writings: 

 

Ray Shinto (pseudonym of demigod supporting character in my early writings)