I'm writing a story that has a bunch of students. I'm not sure if this is the correct place or even the correct site to be asking this, but could you please post as many last names that you can think of? They need to fit this criteria: *not made up (actual last names) *old-fashioned/fairy-tale sounding here are examples: Huntress Meriweather Tweed Greenfield Shoemaker Gardener etc... also, could you give me a list of as many feminine-sounding last names you can think of? Thanks very much!
what i usually do for last names is consider what ethnic backround they may come from, and then google common surnames from that language. however this might not help you, cause it looks like you're writing a fantasy story. Carter Strousser Renkin Porter Gaits Messinger Owens Feminine last names are kinda hard, but i know what you mean. Lohener Kyrlisle Nottingham O'Reiley meh. not sure if that's what you're lookin' for.
Appleby Appleton Archer Baker Blackbourne/Blackburn Blackwood Bloodworth Butcher Bird/Byrd Carpenter Cartwright Carver Cheshire Collingwood Downer Draper Duke Dwerryhouse (literally: "dweller at the dwarf-house.") Dyer Earl Eldridge Fairbairn/Fairchild Fay Fenn Fisher Fletcher Forester Fox (Originally a nickname for cunning people and redheads.) Frost Gully (Originally a nickname for a big person, means "giant") Haggard Hardwick Hawk Heath Honeycutt Honeysett Horn/Horne Lockwood Mallory Meadows Miller Outlaw Pickle Polley Proudfoot Rider Rowbottom Rowntree Ruggles Smedley Smith Strange Summerfield Tailor Tanner Thatcher Thorne Tinker Underhill Underwood Willoughby Winter Wolf/Wolfe I... actually didn't know there even was such a thing as feminin-sounding surnames. oO
You could use a phone book, or the credits at the end of a movie. The latter is good if you need names common in a particular country, and you have a movie filmed in that country.
And you may use some exotic (asian) names like Ahmed Zaman Mahmud Hussain Chowdhury Pandey Shukla Das Chuang Cheng Lim Lou or some tough ones like Balakrishnan Madabhushi Muralidharan Venkatraghban etc
Anything that begins with 'nic' is usually feminine. On that note, why don't people ever give their characters patronymics? It's a lot easier, and if you bastardise the spelling then you've got a surname that could go with any character, regardless of their ethnicity.
Just type in [Ethnicity] surnames on google (i.e. "Vietnamese surnames", or "Chinese surnames", or "Arabic surnames"), and you'll find A LOT. And I mean A @#$%@#$% LOT. I've done it tons of times, and it always brings up results.
