How Naming Characters can Contribute to Worldbuilding on a Global and Localized Scale
Do character names influence culture, society, and personality, or is it the other way around?
Throughout the world, many different countries and cultures utilize naming conventions that carry weight and meaning within their societies and families. Names can also hint at character traits and personality. For worldbuilding and character design, you can use names in many ways to add substance to our world and characters.
Naming characters can be a headache to many creatives. A lot of my characters start with a “place holder” name and then eventually receive a permanent name before I’m done writing.
A lot of times, this is where the advice of giving characters names that reflect personality traits is helpful. A few examples look like:
- Shy young man: Tom Humbolt
- Lottery Winner: Nana Shimpkis
- Dragon rider: Violet Sorrengail
This can also be seen with villains who have names that are considered dark or mysterious. Like Vengar from the D&D cartoon. The name is unusual and the hard vowel at the beginning gives it a dark tone or vibe.
Some readers, viewers, and players love this format of naming because it gives them clues about the characters. Others don’t like it because they think it’s tacky. Either way, it is a popular naming tactic for fictional characters.
While the aforementioned naming method is helpful for character development, there are deeper naming conventions to implement that add layers to worldbuilding.
I spoke to an author who modeled his naming conventions after his wife’s home country, and she helped him ensure that he used the right model to capture the meaning and importance of those naming conventions within her culture.
Each name had a specific meaning to the individual and to the family. Those meanings might not be relevant outside the family. This author discovered that looking up “names from [insert country here]” in Google brought him to lists of names, but when he put them together, his wife told them his combinations were nonsense or wouldn’t work.
Her contributions allowed him to develop a deeper, meaningful naming convention for his fantasy book where names held meaning to individuals and their family members within a specific culture.
He also went about this worldbuilding process by consulting someone from the culture he modeled after to ensure it was represented properly (this is important for all worldbuilders when modeling anything after real world cultures).
Anne McCaffrey is another author who developed a couple of naming conventions for her planet Pern. Human characters are given names that are a combination of their parents’ names. Boys are given names that can easily be contracted with an apostrophe after the first letter as that is the tradition when boys become dragonriders.
Adding to that, all dragons have names ending with a ‘th.’
Her naming conventions built cultural traditions and variation between the dragonriders and holders and crafters.
Sometimes, names have no deeper meaning.
They either sound good, sound fantastical, or are completely made up to fit a vibe or aesthetic.
Some of my books end up with names that are whatever sounded good (I’m not above admitting that), but in some books, I dive into the naming conventions based on culture, tradition, and worldbuilding elements.
As a worldbuilding lover, I prefer the latter, especially in my longer series.
What fiction characters’ names do you love and why? What authors have cool naming conventions you love?
Worldbuilding Spotlight:
Tolkien based a lot of his worldbuilding, including his naming conventions, on Celtic and Old and Middle English languages and ideas.
McCaffrey (to my knowledge) made up her naming conventions, adding variations to her cultures and traditions for her world that required logic and consistency.
A DM I know relies on names from historical eras for his NPCs, based on the aesthetic of the location players find them in.
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