Looking for older sounding names such as the names used in Eragon, names that aren't very common and sound.....magical. Example : Ayra , Eragon , Hagrid Is there any method of finding them or coming up with them or should I pick up the Odyssey and start looking?
I always do "Behind the Name", it has a great bunch of lists with names categorized. Very helpful. I always look to these lists for old sounding names. http://www.behindthename.com/usage.php
Those names are unique to the author, you'll notice. The best way is to simply browse around baby name sites (my personal favorite is 20,000 Names) and pick up the unique ones you like, or create your own. There's no real method.
babynames.com I use the advanced search in order to look for names that fit a type. I was helping another writer once find names for her witch characters and one in particular dealt with water I found through babynames.com that Kendra means water baby or magical so in a since the name could mean "water witch." babynames.com also allows you to search by names with a certain amount of syllables, origin/nationality, and by gender (male, female, and unisex) they also have a few premade lists of names from popular stories like Harry Potter or general lists with titles such as "Spooky Names."
This is cool site: http://www.seventhsanctum.com/index-name.php There's also short story generator if you can induce from one word whole chapter I'm thinking that if I drink too much and get out of ideas, I will use it for sure
I have this problem as well, Perplexity. Sometimes it's best to just make up names- I do this by looking at my misspellings before correcting, and if they look cool I might write them down. Another thing I do is comb the internet by going to places like Google and searching "______ names". If I were you I would type "magical names" or "old sounding names" etc. Then again, clicking on the links posted by other members is a much faster way of getting promising results- or any results, for that matter.
Hagrid is actually derived from the term "hag-ridden", a phrase used to describe someone suffering poor sleep due to nightmares (witches were hags, witches gave you nightmares, therefore you were dogged by witches or "ridden by hags") Try experimenting with phonetics: You'll find that different cultures and languages have distinct sound qualities to them. Japanese is comparatively staccato and discreet by comparison to mainland Asian languages. You have the "romantic" and "gutteral" European languages, the latter named because of how the sounds are created (usually gruffer than their southern counterparts). You can come up with some really fun names just by stringing syllables together: Acris - evil ritual? Elori - pretty woman Excallion - decadent empire Ollaspian - exotic city Lucanis - assassin dude Fideria - Peaceful kingdom Altakeron - The Devourer of Worlds You get the idea.
