How do you pick your characters name?

faeeichenlaub

I started PVE with what felt something bosmer-lore-like, Faellah Eichenlaub (Oakleaf) thinking of the Grahtoaks of Valenwood.

Not envisioning that I would primarily run Cyrodiil PVP 6 years later. I am envious of some of the clever taunting names used in PVP. Which are really quite a riot!

I wish there was a way to swap out the name when in PVP, and outside of RP/PVE.

AcadianPaladin

Buffy's name is. . . complicated. Even as a tiny elf, her parents had trouble keeping clothes on her - particularly around any body of water. In the buff as it were. . . even to this day, she often shucks off her buckskins around any waterfall for a swim. Secondly, I liked the idea of alliteration, as in Buffy the blonde Bosmer from Bravil, and I thought Buffy sounded better than Barbie or Bambi. Thirdly, like another young blonde, she quite dislikes vampires and has been known to actively hunt them. And lastly, I felt a rather tongue in cheek name like Buffy might keep me from taking her too seriously.

I named her while playing Oblivion in 2007. After learning the secrets of time travel, she subsequently moved to Skyrim and eventually on to ESO a few years ago. Between those three games, she has amassed over 17,000 hours of playtime so, as you can see, my idea of not taking her too seriously failed miserably.

In ESO, she plays as numerous classes and switches between them as readily as she changes outfits or hairstyles. Her appearance, pet, precious mare all remain the same. Even her name remains constant within the administrative restrictions of the game via the use of accents or stylized letters.

Starlight_Whisper

https://www.wordhippo.com/

Poetic meanings or just something that means what I want but sounds cooler.

Ex
Wind Caller
Sinful Moon

Lumenn

All of mine are tailored to each character, how I imagine they will be(in actual play they often take on their own personality regardless of what I planned.

Blood Howl: a wood elf stamina sorcerer /werewolf who's since become magicka after 5 years.

Sinistyr: a khajiit stamina necromancer

Black of Soul: argonian nightblade magicka

Knight Whisper: khajiit stamina nightblade

Makes Grass Grow: argonian magicka warden(our U.S. military should get that one

Conriocht: wood elf stamina warden werewolf(not sure how true since my grandfather was an infant coming here from Ireland but i was always told werewolves were protectors/defenders and not horrible monsters.

Daigon Wrath: magicka dragonknight easily "Dragons Wrath"

Keaghan McClain: nord stamina Dragonknight, actual grandmother's maiden name.

And of course Lumenn Sunblaze: a character that was first invented 20 years ago in EQ as a druid on Brell Serelis. Current incarnation is a templar, mostly magicka

craybest

my main Ganymede Sicard. I took the first name from the greek myth of Zeus kidnapping a young man for his beauty, and for the last name I improvised something that sounded cool for a mercenary type of character. (Sicard is relatively close to Sicario, which in spanish is some kind of hitman)

Athan1

It's so hard to pick names so I just go with lore and race-friendly versions of own name. My Altmer was called "Athanasios of Skywatch". I race-changed him to Imperial, so now he is known as "Athanasius X" (the 10th).

Grizzbeorn

I do my best to be in-line with lore, while being creative with an actual name (not silly or funny, but fantasy-flavored in most cases) that includes a surname when appropriate to ensure that their first name sticks.

geonsocal

17 toons and counting across two servers...they're all called Geo's "something or another"...actually a few on the second server have the same name as on the first (different builds, but, the same appearance)...let's see:

Geo's Crafty Bret [magblade] [NA]
Geo's Magic Man [magplar] [NA]
Geo's Party Elf (x 2) [mag sorc, magblade] [NA, EU]
Geo's Mister Nice Guy (x 2) [stamplar, stam dk] [NA, EU]
Geo's Imp [stam dk] [NA]
Geo's Sneaky Ass [stamblade] [NA]
Geo's Dragonbreath [mag dk] [NA]
Geo's Sylvester [stam warden] [NA]
Geo's Likes-to-Watch (x 2) [mag warden, mag sorc] [NA, EU]
Geo's Little Big Man [stam sorc] [NA]
Geo's Main Man [magplar] [EU]
Geo's Nature Boy [stam warden] [EU]
Geo's Deadman [stam necro] [EU]
Geo's Nordic Night [mag necro] [EU]

I think that's it

when i first started gaming - i used to name all my saved games Geo's "something or another" and it's just stayed with me...

i can only imagine how weird folks may think i am when the run across my toons in cyro with all similar looking names...

Hapexamendios

It varies.

Named an Imperial after a Roman Emperor.

Named a couple Nords, one lore friendly another suitable for always using the drunk personality.

Gave a High Elf the longest lore friendly name I could find.

Got a little silly with my Argonians.

Others are basically from a lore name generator site

CaptainVenom

I don't really take lore into account when picking a name. However I try to stay somewhat imersive by picking an actual name, not something like 2Tanky4U.

Suna_Ye_Sunnabe

Lore friendly but still fitting to the character, here. As with their appearances.

AinSoph

Names from other Games I personally play

Iluvrien

Lore friendly.

Compiled all TES3 Dunmer first names of all NPCs aligned with House Telvanni. Then decomposed them into elements based on commonalities between them. Then generated lists based on those elements. Finally, picked a few I liked the sound of and did a quick search to see if it was already in use.

Wandering_Immigrant

Usually some pun or play on words, often with a pop culture reference. I actually have a lot of characters named after or inspired by song titles and lyrics, I mostly seem to do that with females for some reason.

Little Red Corvette (Prince song) is my little red haired Bosmer girl.

Buttercup Baby, as in "why do you build me up, buttercup Baby, just to let me down, and mess me around," is my muscular but cute Orc stamblade.

Wilma's Rainbow (Helmet song and album tittle), is my breton Templar healer.

Dirty Deidra, Dunmer Chic (pronounced sheek, as in Dirty Deeds, Done dirt cheap) in my Dunmer necro vampire girl.

Extra Ordinary Automaton. This one is a double reference, named for Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, I changed machine to automaton to be more lore friendly and separated extraordinary into Extra Ordinary in reference to the show Umbrella Academy and Vanya's book Extra Ordinary.

Sam's Bloody Rage, my stamDK werewolf is also a song reference, but it's a long story so I'll leave it to your imagination how it relates to any song... And no it's not Summer In The City, the song about the Summer of Sam serial killings where the angry little man went crazy because his nieghbor's dog wouldn't stop barking and he thought it was telling him to kill people, but wow, wouldn't that make sense with him being a werewolf. So if that was your guess, A for effort you know your music.

Not all pop culture references are song related though, like;

Summerset Barbie, as in Malibu Barbie but she's an Altmer from Summerset.

Orc and Bear, my Orc warden, named for Moose and Squirrel, otherwise known as Rocky and Bullwinkle

Reeb Maiden, my female nord warden healer. This is Beer Maiden with beer spelled backwards, a reference to the Brad Pitt and David Duchoveny movie Kalifornia, where Brad pitt's character always calls beers reebs.

I have other alcohol related ones

Nede'smore Mead, my nord dk tank

Fuzzy Navel, a Khajiit, because he probably has a furry belly button.

I don't usually expect people to get the references, but when they do it's pretty cool, especially for the more obscure ones.

Zulera301

I look for linguistic patterns in the names of the race I'm choosing, and model names after that accordingly.

as such, I'm fairly sure that most people would be able to name the races of characters like Aeliana Arenius, Faralinwe Silinal, Valkea Snow-Moon, Claudelle Vienne, Zaienderwen Firalenye, Zeira af-Jinsi, Fjorm Fair-Shield, Naveya Sileth, or Varick Everard, without even needing to see what they look like.

Monte_Cristo

i assume I'm not the only one who's named a Khajiit after a pet cat they had.

OneForSorrow

Lore friendly, which gets harder and harder the longer this game is out.

rpa

Short. Without ümläůtš. Usually a word with slightly silly meaning in my first language.

I did try a lore friendly (but silly) name once but was forced to change it because someone took offence.

ImmortalCX

The pharmaceutical companies have taken all the good fantasy names and used them for drugs.

Megatto

I look at UESP for lore friendly names for my characters.

RaddlemanNumber7

Imperials, Altmer and Argonians all have names that are descriptive of the character, loosely translated from English into the appropriate language to make them at least superficially lore-friendly, e.g.

Ambrosius Albus = (The) Shining Immortal
Angarielle = Frozen Beauty
Xul-Hajthuxis = Hidden Serpent Means Death.

I'd like to do the same with my Khajiit but the available vocabulary is too restricted. Some names have to stay in English. We need more ta'agra words!

My boring, old Bretons and Dunmer have names assembled out of bits of NPC names from TES III / IV, e.g. Simine Belette, Drals Ienith. I brightened up SImine Belette by having him possessed by a Xivkyn soulbrander who goes by the name of Morgor Buronagaia - “Mori (dark, ill-fated) Gori (secret), Buro (slave) Nagaia (death)”.

EvilAutoTech

Only a few characters beside my necromancers were named in advance. Usually I create the character and then wait until the name crawls out of my skull. I have to modify it when the name is already taken. Sometimes it stays close to the original idea but sometimes I think of something totally different.

Rarely, I name characters based on my theme for the account. One of my accounts is all Nords. On the EU server, they all share a clan name and their first names all end in "asha". On the NA server, they share a different surname and the first names reflect their class or role, for instance, one of the tanks is named Patton and one of the Sorcs is named Sparkie.

wheresbes

I've started to name all my characters Strela (which means arrow) after playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. SoC while the surname is something lore-friendly. My main here has a surname from an NPC I liked in TESIV while the alts are Strela of (insert name of a Skyrim city since they're all Nords)

IBreathlesSI

I have list of names that I use for every game. Not specially made for a game. My account name is Breathless everywhere. I mean everywhere as it is my nickname for having respituary problems. Now cured. They are proud members of house Wolf. Special people around the world left their previous names and titles behind to work for a single cause.

Bambang Wolf Indonesian(means knight)
R
Eisenheim Wolf German(kind of)
A
Till Wolf Elvish
Hakan Wolf Turkish
Lev Wolf Russian
Ezio Wolf Italian
Shahid Wolf Arab
S

Till ,being the reluctant leader of house Wolf, my main. Missing names are I don't have a toon for yet. I have a similar set of female names but its not complete. Those names (except Till) are subject to change.

Kaartinen

Tank: Soft-Like-Marshmallow
MagSorc: Jolted
MagNB: Promachos
MagWarden: Hoarfrost
StamNB: Ribcage
StamWarden: Bears-It-All

I forget the other accts..

old_scopie1945

Easy Fantasy Name Generators.
https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/altmer_names.php

Ryuvain

I simply chose my name because it's a very old name that I made a long time ago. It's the same name as my forum one.

It's a portmanteau of dragon and veins, mostly a odd take at saying dragonblood. It just happens to stick with me.

Chyro

I kinda tend to use the same name for my main char in any game.
.. just had to add a lastname here cause it was taken

Though if I was aware of lore-friendly naming before char creation, I may have tried to 'morph' it a bit to pass as a Khajiit name.

LalMirchi

In the beginning I wasn't sure if I'd stay in the game as I was so attached to Skyrim.

So I named my characters generically: Sorceress, Publican, Enchante etc.

Fast forward a few years later and I'm regretting that decision but 2500 Crowns per character is rather expensive.If they do a sale on Crowns this holiday I probably bite the bullet.

Yellow_Monolith

I always keep my characters lore friendly. Like my pve Breton magplar dd Billy Idol or my magsorc Blondie xD