Tavern name generator

A tavern sign is an article and two words. This page runs that frame 10,000 times to answer the question a city map actually asks: how many inns can you name before two of them match? The median run gets there on draw 115.

Fifty tavern names from the run

• The Splintered Wolf
• The Mourning Owl
• The Grim Lion
• The Drake and Jug
• The Glass Jackal
• The Weeping Ring
• The Dog and Needle
• The Magpie and Coin
• The Trout and Barrel
• The Stag and Mask
• The Grinning Chalice
• The Porcelain Crown
• The Grim Swan
• The Ragged Kettle
• The Cat and Anchor
• The Lion and Anvil
• The Crow and Crown
• The Grim Mirror
• The Grinning Oar
• The Wounded Jackal
• The Salmon and Candle
• The Crooked Pipe
• The Crow and Bridge
• The White Mask
• The Black Rooster
• The Wounded Helm
• The Green Griffin
• The Ragged Ox
• The Pig and Lantern
• The Empty Donkey
• The Restless Serpent
• The Crimson Gate
• The Thirsty Elk
• The Salt Pig
• The Owl and Wagon
• The Sparrow and Mirror
• The Wandering Drake
• The Broken Toad
• The White Worm
• The Dying Mug
• The Mad Wagon
• The Brazen Basilisk
• The Silent Tower
• The Boar and Saddle
• The Smoking Ring
• The Smoking Salmon
• The Viper and Drum
• The Singing Cat
• The Swan and Mirror
• The Porcelain Wolf

Seed 20261023, tavern mode, fifty names, duplicate guard on so the batch holds no repeats. The register moves between a sign you could paint (The Porcelain Crown) and one that sounds like a rumour (The Splintered Wolf), because the adjective list runs from painted to wounded.

The pool is 8,948 signs, and the run used 67.3% of it

10,000 mixed draws produced 6,021 different signs, so 3,979 of them (39.8%) were names already drawn. That is 67.3% of the 8,948 possible strings, close to what the birthday problem predicts for 10,000 draws from a pool that size: 6,022. The run landed 1 name from that figure, and the three shapes individually land within 0.6% of their own prediction — so the repetition is not a bias in the generator, it is the size of the bank.

The first repeat lands at draw 115

Five hundred fresh sessions, each seeded differently, each drawing until something repeats. The median session hit its first duplicate on draw 115; the mean was 118.9, the tenth percentile 48 and the ninetieth 200. None of the 500 sessions repeated inside ten draws; 216 of them (43%) repeated inside a hundred. The birthday model for a pool that size says 119.2, so the generator is sitting on that line rather than above it.

This is the number that matters when you prep in a notebook: past roughly a hundred signs, half of what you write down is already on an earlier page. Below that, the pool still feels bottomless, which is why tavern names seem to run dry on the third page of notes rather than the tenth.

Naming a city: twenty inns or fifty

Each city below is a draw of k names from the measured distribution; the trial counts a failure if any two match. Twenty inns collide in 3.09% of cities, fifty in 18.27%. The mean number of duplicate names in a fifty-inn city is 0.20.

The three shapes, counted separately

Each shape drew 2,000 times on its own seed. Adjective + object has the largest bank (3,248 strings) and the best new-name rate at 75.2% per draw; the two shapes that put a creature in the sign repeat first, and the gap between the winner and the loser is 4.0 names in a hundred.

Read the last two columns together: every shape lands within a fraction of a percent of the closed-form answer, which is the useful part. Repetition cannot be fixed by changing the rhythm of the name — only by adding words to the thin list.

The shortest word list is the busiest

Two of the three shapes put a creature in the sign, so the creature list takes two thirds of all draws: 133.3 draws per creature word against 114.9 per adjective and 119.0 per object. Every word in all three lists turned up at least once in the 10,000 (58 of 58, 50 of 50, 56 of 56), so nothing is dead weight — the creature list is simply the shortest and the busiest. Busiest words: creatures Worm 153, Sparrow 152, Raven 151, Manticore 148, Bear 146; adjectives Smoking 137, Empty 134, Crowing 130, Burning 129, Laughing 129; objects Bottle 148, Horn 138, Crown 137, Tower 137, Window 134.

Practical version: if two inns in one district should feel unrelated, change the creature, not the adjective. The Silver Boar and The Rusted Boar read as the same house with a repaint.

Using these at the table

• One shape per district. Keep the “and” names for the docks and the adjective names for the hill. A city where every sign uses one shape reads as one tavern with fifty fronts.
• Twenty is the safe number. Below twenty inns a repeat shows up in under 3% of cities; at fifty it is one city in five and a half. Write them down as you go and check the list before you invent another.
• Pick the word the sign hangs on. The Porcelain Crown promises a lord fallen on hard times; The Screaming Crow promises a fight. The adjective sets the tone, the noun sets the trade — which is why the same fifty can carry both The Ragged Kettle and The Dying Mug.
• Take the shortlist, not the order. The fifty above are one seed's worth. Reroll the tavern mode and you get fifty more under the same rules with a different draw.

Questions this page answers

Reproduce this page

var s=document.createElement('script'); s.src='/assets/tavern-stats.js'; document.body.appendChild(s);

The script draws through the site's own makeTavernName, so the three word lists, the three shapes and the retry rule are the shipped ones. Parameters: seed 20261023, 10,000 mixed draws, 2,000 per shape, 500 sessions of up to 400 draws, 20,000 cities per size, fifty-name shortlist. It prints the same numbers to the console and leaves them on window.__TAVERN_STATS.

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