I studied Germanic languages and literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Old Norse sits on the North Germanic branch of that same family — my department also taught Swedish, which is a modern descendant of it, and that is where the northern branch first caught my attention. I have been reading around old European languages ever since, as an enthusiast rather than as an academic. I want to be precise about that distinction: my degree is in the Germanic family, not a doctorate in Old Norse philology, and this site is the work of someone who reads the dictionaries carefully — not of a specialist in the field.
Why I built NameLore
Like a lot of people who spend time in invented worlds — I came to this partly through A Song of Ice and Fire — I got tired of name generators that produce impressive-sounding nonsense. A string like "Vyrloth" has a shape but no content. It cannot be translated, it cannot be justified, and if a reader ever asks what it means, there is no answer. The names in the traditions I was reading were the opposite: overwhelmingly literal, often mundane, and all the more convincing for it. A famous longship was called the Long Serpent. A settlement was the village by the birches.
So NameLore is built the other way round. Instead of generating syllables and hoping they sound Norse, it assembles names from a lexicon of real Old Norse elements, each one tagged with its attested meaning — and then it shows you the arithmetic. Every name on this site can be taken apart into its roots and translated back. That is the entire product.
How the lexicon is compiled
The root list is built by hand, entry by entry, from public-domain reference works rather than from scraped wordlists or from a language model. For each root I check the gloss, prefer forms that are actually attested over reconstructions, and record the meaning in the form the dictionary gives it — which is why the etymologies shown under a generated name are sometimes blunter than a fantasy author might wish. "Edge of mask" is what the roots say, so that is what the site says.
The two works the lexicon leans on are both freely readable online, so you never have to take my word for a gloss:
- An Icelandic-English Dictionary
Richard Cleasby & Gudbrand Vigfusson (1874) — The standard historical dictionary of Old Norse; the primary source for root meanings.
- A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic
Geir T. Zoëga (1910) — Used as a cross-check on glosses and on which forms are actually attested.
What I will not do
No names lifted from existing franchises, and no roots invented to make a name sound better. If an element is not in the dictionaries, it does not go in the lexicon — the same way a figure that is not in a source does not go on a page. Where I am uncertain about a gloss, I would rather leave the root out than guess in public.
Corrections welcome
If you know this material better than I do and something here is wrong, I would genuinely like to hear it — write to hello@namelore.io. Corrections get made and credited.