Two-Column Name Generators: Top 100 American Names

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paald Revere

In the previous post on Slavic names I mentioned that many naming conventions break down in this format, which is to say that when broken apart and recombined they tend to produce results that either sound too stupid to use, not enough like the parent names, or both. This tends to happen when there aren't a lot of shared components in the names (making it difficult to split them up), or when the target audience is very familiar with the real versions and is subsequently more apt to notice that your store brand versions just don't taste quite the same. In situations like that, the two-column format is likely to be the wrong tool for the job.

As a demonstration, it's only fair that after I made such a hash of the fair Italian and the noble Slav I turn the lens of my two-column name format on the good old US of A. Putting a generator together from the SSA's Top American Names of the Past 100 Years is basically that effect distilled into a table.

d00 Roll	Prefix	d00 Roll	Prefix
1-2	Aman	51-52	Kath
3-4	Anth	53-54	Kev
5-6	Ash	55-56	Kim
7-8	Bri	57-58	Lis
9-10	Charl	59-60	Mar
11-12	Christ	61-62	Matt
13-14	Dan	63-64	Mel
15-16	Dav	65-66	Mich
17-18	Deb	67-68	Nanc
19-20	Don	69-70	No
21-22	Dor	71-72	Pa
23-24	Edw	73-74	Patr
25-26	Eliz	75-76	Rich
27-28	Em	77-78	Rob
29-30	Er	79-80	Ron
31-32	Hel	81-82	Ry
33-34	Hunt	83-84	Sam
35-36	Jam	85-86	Sar
37-38	Jas	87-88	Shar
39-40	Jeff	89-90	Steph
41-42	Jenn	91-92	Stev
43-44	Jess	93-94	Sus
45-46	Jon	95-96	Tim
47-48	Josh	97-98	Tom
49-50	Kar	99-00	Will

d20 Roll	Masculine Suffix	Feminine Suffix
1	-ael	-a
2	-ah	-abeth
3	-ald	-ah
4	-an	-anda
5	-ard	-anie
6	-as	-antha
7	-athan	-elle
8	-eph	-en
9	-er	-erly
10	-ert	-ica
11	-es	-icia
12	-hew	-ie
13	-iam	-ifer
14	-ic	-ily
15	-id	-issa
16	-on	-leen
17	-opher	-ley
18	-rey	-ony
19	-ua	-orah
20	-ul	-othy

Masculine Examples: Marard, Joshert, Robeph, Huntid, Jaman, Jonathan, Ronopher, Mattald

Feminine Examples: Jonleen, Michothy, Doricia, Sarily, Susantha, Kimorah, Paily, Briony

"Elizard you bastard, I demand satisfaction!"
"Come then Kathhew, try my steel"

As you can see, it mostly produces nonsense with the occasional real name perfectly reproduced (it also has a chance of getting "Anthony" as a female name). It would take a great deal more curation and adjustments to get this table working properly - for a start it probably needs separate prefixes for masculine and feminine names. If for some reason you wanted to run a fantasy game with a contemporary American aesthetic, this table is likely to give you worse results than if you had just asked your players to make something up themselves. I do think it's funny that you can generate "Paid" as a boy's name off of here though (that's the first half of "Paul" and the back half of "David," if you were wondering).

Young Tomathan and Karabeth on an adventure