Random British Name Generator

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A random name generator is useful for anyone who needs, well, a list of random names! Uses include authors who want a realistic set of names they can put into fiction, roleplayers who want realistic names for their characters and programmers who want plausible looking names for test data.

You can choose from a database of current names, or the 1881 census if you want a historical feel. And you can select either male, female or mixed names. Some names, of course, are unisex and can show up in any list. The list defaults to 50 names, but you can go up to 200. Any more than that thrashes the server too much.

The British Surnames random name generator doesn't just pick names at random, it weights the selection according to the actual probability of finding that name in the population at large. So, for example, it's more likely to give you "John Smith" than "Edmund Sidebottom" even though the latter is a possible result. This makes it more realistic than many random name generators which simply pick randomly from a list and thus tend to overemphasise uncommon names.

Because it uses a weighted random selection it can occasionally give duplicates, especially when doing a large number of single-sex names. But this, too, is realistic - if you picked a large number of people at random from real life, there's a small but non-trivial probability that two (or more) of them will share the same name.

The names are based on databases of real forename and surname combinations, rather than picking them at random independently. This minimises the prospect of implausible combinations such as "Mohammed Cohen" which are more likely if the surname and forename are picked independently. On the other hand, a drawback of this approach is that it won't offer up any combination of less common names which don't exist in the database. This is more of an issue with the database of current names, as this is based on a statistical sample rather than including everyone in the country.

The 1881 names are taken from the census records themselves, but this can have the drawback that it also includes any typos made by the census takers or their later transcribers. So you need to be a little careful with using some of the less common names as they may, in fact, be erroneous.

The random name generator is based on names across the UK as a whole, and doesn't allow for regional differences. This is less of a problem for contemporary names, at least across most of England, but it won't give a particularly representative selection if you want a list of potentially Scottish or Welsh names. And for the 1881 census, that's more of a problem as names tended to be much more regionalised back then. If you need to focus on names with a particular local relevance, then at the moment the only way to do that is to check the one returned by the generator and weed out the ones you don't need. Given sufficient round tuits I may address this at some stage in the future, but it's unlikely to happen in the short term.

Random Names

Alan Abel
Luke Anderson
Margaret Bennett
Lisa Billett
Ian Billingham
Karl Blake
Hugh Bland
Ian Brown
James Bryan
Fraser Burrill
Frank Butterworth
Sarah Chew
David Clarke
Simon Cox
Abby Crossley
Leon Dawson
Sharon Duffy
Teresa Ellis
Michelle George
Anne Hamblin
Joanne Hawkins
Faye Heal
Victor Henderson
Gordon Hutchison
Jasminder Johal
Lynda Jones
Suzanne Kendrick
Gillian Leather
Weijie Lin
Margaret MacArthur
Patricia MacLean
George McFarlane
Ashley McKay
Diarmad McNally
David McSweeney
Matthew Monk
Beryl Newton
Hema Patel
Carl Pearson
Gavin Powell
Philip Ranson
Michael Rolfe
Lynden Seal
Colleen Seymour
Alan Sherwood
David Turley
Bessie Turner
Andrea Wilmott
Roger Wilson
Richard Wiseman

BritishSurnames.uk is a Good Stuff website.