DnD names

Thirty-six names, one from every race this generator carries, all from the seed 20261031 with the five styles rotating. The letter count beside each one is counted, not guessed. Then the part a name list cannot give you: 144,000 names drawn race by race, because “DnD names are usually long” is not an answer — 14.24 letters and 17.49 letters are.

• Gairic Harrowcott Human · 16 letters
• Sevaeriel Starbough High Elf · 18 letters
• Themomath Dawnwind Wood Elf · 17 letters
• Quaelael Duskhearth Drow · 18 letters
• Lanaerar Dawnbrook Half-Elf · 17 letters
• Dadur Bouldervein Hill Dwarf · 16 letters
• Vehaustein Copperdelver Mountain Dwarf · 22 letters
• Nukhozur Grimforge Duergar · 17 letters
• Badedy Goodbarrel Lightfoot Halfling · 16 letters
• Merilod Thistlebough Stout Halfling · 19 letters
• Giry Nettlewhistle Forest Gnome · 17 letters
• Terisick Fernbutton Rock Gnome · 18 letters
• Morerosh Stonejaw Half-Orc · 16 letters
• Ginur Bonecut Orc · 12 letters
• Shaaxolar Ironwing Dragonborn · 17 letters
• Krimop Ironmaw Kobold · 13 letters
• Maenilath Dreadshade Tiefling · 19 letters
• Relaerath Lightcrest Aasimar · 19 letters
• Korir Scorchborn Fire Genasi · 15 letters
• Vawelune Cinderfire Water Genasi · 18 letters
• Kemek Stoneclad Goliath · 14 letters
• Maesawyn Oakbound Firbolg · 16 letters
• Serorr Reedtail Tabaxi · 14 letters
• Vemir Duskleap Leonin · 13 letters
• Shozech Scrapcall Kenku · 16 letters
• Koreel Rustvoice Aarakocra · 15 letters
• Natoth Rustcall Owlin · 14 letters
• Zunaasish Marshveil Lizardfolk · 18 letters
• Sekanis Coilbound Yuan-ti · 16 letters
• Thovelon Pearlstone Triton · 18 letters
• Varus Vinemantle Satyr · 15 letters
• Bedaniss Mossbound Fairy · 17 letters
• Narelum Grovemantle Changeling · 18 letters
• Tasnug Sootmuck Goblin · 14 letters
• Dubaig Grubnag Hobgoblin · 13 letters
• Velek Shardplate Warforged · 15 letters

That is the inventory in order, human first and warforged last — nothing re-sorted for taste and no name dropped for being awkward. Every line is a given name from the race's own onsets, vowels and closing syllables, plus a surname from the table the race shares with its culture. The counts run from 12 letters (Ginur Bonecut) to 22 (Vehaustein Copperdelver). If one of them is a character, take it; if not, roll two hundred at the dnd name generator.

Three and a quarter letters, top to bottom

Mean length of the full name in letters, the space not counted, 4,000 names per race: batches of 200 at seeds 20261031 to 20261050, styles rotating one per row. The top row and the bottom row come out of the same builder with the same batch size. The only thing that changes is which race row is asked for.

The rank is the least interesting column. The three beside it are the argument. Inside one surname table the surname mean barely moves — the three elf races sit at 9.620, 9.627, 9.632 — while their given names run 7.040 to 7.860. The next two sections count what each layer is actually worth.

Two layers, one of them fixed

Add the layers up and the 36 race means average 16.093 letters: 6.972 of given name and 9.122 of surname. Split the same thing as variance and 0.695 = 0.328 (given) + 0.287 (surname) + 0.080 (the cross term — a long given name and a long surname table often come from the same cultures).

Group by surname table instead of by race and the shape tightens. There are 19 tables of 64 surnames each — 1,216 surnames in total — and 0.598 of that 0.695, 86.1%, sits between tables rather than inside them. A race's own letter pool decides how its given names sound; the table it shares with its culture decides how long they are.

Neither layer alone orders the table: rank correlation with the total is 0.741 against the surname mean and 0.755 against the given mean. Two dials pulling about equally is why orc carries the 10th longest given name of the 36 (7.446) and still lands 27th overall: its table is the shortest in the inventory at 8.002.

The control: 29 races share a table

12 of the 19 tables are used by more than one race, which hands you a control the ranking cannot give. Hold the surname table fixed and everything that still moves is the given-name layer.

The widest is the bird table: aarakocra, kenku and owlin draw the same 64 surnames and still sit 1.344 letters apart (16.398 down to 15.054) — a wider range than the whole top nine of the ranking above (17.487 down to 16.642, a 0.845 gap). The narrowest is the orc table: orc and half-orc share everything and land within 0.155 of each other.

Why the given name stops at ten

Two rules in makeGiven set the ceiling, and only the first one binds:

      if (out.length <= 10 || count === 1) break;
      count -= 1;   // too long: drop one opening syllable and rebuild

    if (out.length > 14) out = out.slice(0, 14).replace(/[^aeiouy]+$/, "");

Read them in order. A stem that passes ten letters is rebuilt with one fewer opening syllable, so a length rule, not the style, decides how many syllables a long name gets. In 144,000 draws no given name reached eleven letters; the longest is ten, and the slice at fourteen is a backstop nothing came within four letters of. A full name still reaches 23 letters, because one of the 19 surname tables holds names of 6 to 15 letters and the given name brings up to ten.

Style, and what it does not touch

Every figure above rotates the five styles one per row, so the comparison is race against race. The other dial is the style setting, and this site has already measured it on the given name: the cool names page runs 10,000 names per register and puts the median at 5 letters for Gritty (mean 5.29) against 8 for Noble and Archaic (means 7.95 and 8.13). Read at full-name scale instead — 36,000 names per style across all 36 races, surname included — the same setting runs 14.432 to 16.965, a 2.533-letter dial against the 3.249 the races give you.

What style does not touch is the surname. makeClan takes the race and nothing else, so the 64 names in a table are the same 64 whichever style you pick — a gritty high elf is still on the elf table, and the 86.1% figure above does not move when you change the setting. The two dials are independent, so they stack: with both of them free the inventory's own range is 9 to 23 letters, and the extremes are what you get when a short race meets a short style or a long one meets a long one.

Picking by length instead of by sound

When the count matters more than the sound — a name that has to survive a 24-character field, a party that has to stay distinguishable at a glance — the order above is the practical answer.

• Shortest by race. The bottom four are Tabaxi 14.238, Goblin 14.499, Lightfoot Halfling 14.738 and Leonin 14.829 — all inside 0.591 letters, which is narrower than the gap between rank one and rank nine.
• Shortest by style. Gritty is the one style that pulls every race down: 14.432 against 16.965 for Archaic, a 2.533-letter decision made before a single syllable is drawn.
• One race, held fixed. Inside a race the given name is worth at most 1.344 letters and the table cannot change at all — so rerolling buys a different sound, not a shorter name.

None of this is a rule about what a name should be. It is what the builder does when you press the button, measured tightly enough that you can pick the row you want instead of rolling until something fits.

Where the numbers come from

Seeds 20261031 to 20261050, 20 batches of 200 per race, 4,000 names per race and 144,000 in total. The style figures come from a second pass of 36,000 names per style over the same seed range, one style locked per pass. Letters are counted on the finished string with the space removed. The ten-letter ceiling, the 23-letter maximum and every mean above are observations from that run. The constants that shape them are in assets/namegen.js: the ten-letter rebuild and the fourteen-letter slice in makeGiven, the per-race syllable inventories, the 19 surname tables in CLANS, and RACE_CULTURE, the map that turns 36 races into 19 tables. The measurement script is tools/race_length_measure.js in the site repo, and it calls the shipped functions rather than a copy of them. The syllable pools are MIT-licensed at github.com/RayJ7/dnd-name-forge-pools.

Two neighbouring pages go deeper on single layers: elf names covers the race at the top of this table, and DnD last names covers the surname layer on its own. The statistics page keeps the reproducibility notes for the rest of the site.

Questions this page answers