At the moment, I am planning a fantasy novel and one of the key groups involved is an evil cult. I am struggling to come up with a suitable (non cheesy) name for them. Basically, they are a secret cult (like the illuminati) that want the destruction of great works of fiction in order to change culture to their more "utopian" standards.
I'm pretty sure everyone here will tell you, and their right, that you need to make up your own name. My only recommendation is that you try to not make them sound too sinister. This "evil" cult most likely doesn't think its evil, right? So why would they give themselves an evil sounding name?
I would suggest that you give them a virtuous-sounding name, since although we think they are evil, they do not think of themselves as evil. Whatever name you give them should reflect the way they see themselves, not the way we see them. Also, it's creepier.
The thing I like about Illuminati is the Latin. Depending on the details of your group, you might want to consider translating a name, see if it sounds 'appropriately righteous' for them.
You could call them The Baneful Ambiguous Deviants And Spiteful Scholars. Or just BADASS for short. I'm obviously just kidding here. I like using translations from other languages for things like this too.
I vote for Steph's idea. It's the best. Or else we could just band together and become an evil writer gang trying to propagandize the world using that acronym. On topic, I highly recommend thesaurus com. It's pretty handy in coming up with new words to find. As for thinking off the top of my head, um, you could try something like "The Order of the ..." as an official title. Pick a focus for your group, like a specific animal or maybe a type of magic. "The Order of the Written Word"....huh. Something that clearly says what their main theme is. Though, I feel the need to point something out. If a group intends to destroy literature, that won't work. That will only make people want to write more, and make writers a more powerful society. Which may be where you want to go in your story, as you can get some good drama out of that. However, realistically speaking, the best means of getting rid of literature is to saturate the literary world with dull, stupid, pretentious writing. It's like public school. They make you read the most boring, depressing, self-righteous crap they can find, and now kids these days don't want to read if they can get out of it. Therefore, your cult should do that. Unless you'd prefer them to just destroy stuff because they're too nuts to know better. It's perfectly workable either way.
