It's tempting to borrow. You need an elf, and 'Drow' or 'Drizzt' is right there; you need a fierce race and 'Khajiit' or 'Dragonborn' fits perfectly. The problem is that those names aren't free — they're invented terms tied to specific published works and, in many cases, registered trademarks. If your project is ever published, sold, streamed, or turned into a game, names lifted from someone else's world are a liability you don't need. The good news: the sources those worlds drew from are open to everyone, and you can draw from them too.
What you actually can and can't borrow
A useful rule of thumb: real languages and ancient mythology are public domain; specific modern inventions are not. 'Thor', 'Freya', and the Old Norse word for 'wolf' belong to no one — they're thousands of years old. 'Mjolnir' as a word is ancient, but a particular franchise's version of a character can carry trademark and copyright weight. The fictional species names coined by modern games and novels — the invented words a setting made up for its peoples, places, and magic — are exactly the things to avoid. When in doubt, ask: did this word exist before the franchise, or did the franchise create it? Pre-existing is safe; freshly coined is not.
Source 1: build from real languages
The richest, safest well is real historical language. Old Norse, Old English, Latin, Gaelic, and Greek are full of short, evocative roots for the things fantasy names are made of — wolf, raven, stone, fame, victory, light, sea, storm. Combine two of them and you have a name with built-in meaning: a 'victory-wolf', a 'stone-fame', a 'sea-serpent'. This is exactly how historical names were formed, so the results sound authentic rather than invented, and because you're assembling roots rather than copying a finished name, what you make is original.
Our generators are built on precisely this method: each name is assembled from genuine Old Norse word-roots and shown with its literal meaning and etymology, so you're never copying a name from a copyrighted world — you're minting a new one from public-domain parts.
Generate elf names from Old Norse roots →Generate Norse warrior names →Source 2: mine public-domain mythology — carefully
World mythologies are open territory, but with one important caveat: take the elements, not the proper nouns. The idea of a frost-giant, a world-serpent, or a guardian spirit is ancient and free. The exact stylised name a modern game gave its frost-giants may not be. So lean on the underlying concepts and the descriptive language — the words for frost, for giant, for serpent — and assemble your own names from them, rather than reusing the polished proper noun a recent work made famous. You get the mythic resonance without standing on anyone's trademark.
Source 3: sound-alike, meaning-different
If you love the feel of a particular fictional language, study what gives it that feel — its favourite consonants, its syllable shapes, its endings — and then generate new words that share the texture without sharing the vocabulary. A setting might love soft 'l' and 'th' sounds and trailing vowels; you can write names that breathe the same air ('Aelith', 'Lothiel') without using a single coined term that belongs to that setting. You're borrowing a style, which no one owns, instead of words, which someone might.
How to sanity-check a name before you use it
- Search the name. If the top results are all one franchise, character, or product, pick something else.
- Separate word from world: an ancient root is safe; a modern coined term is not.
- Prefer names you assembled from parts over names you copied whole.
- Avoid exact species and place names invented by specific games or books.
- If a name carries real meaning you can explain, it's almost certainly your own creation, not a borrowed one.
Originality here isn't only a legal safeguard — it's a creative upgrade. A name you built from real roots means something, and that meaning can quietly reinforce a character: a healer whose name means 'mercy', a doomed king whose name means 'twilight'. That's something a borrowed name can never give you, because its meaning belongs to someone else's story. Start from the roots, and the name becomes part of yours.
Generate legendary hero names →Generate dwarf names from the forge-roots →