Open Fantasy Name Corpus

2,705 curated names across 18 naming traditions — free to download and use under CC BY 4.0

These are the training corpora behind every NamingRealm generator, the Fantasy Name Analyzer, and the statistics in The Sound of Fantasy. Each list was hand-curated so that the names in it agree with each other phonetically — that consistency is what makes them useful as a dataset. Use them for your own generators, for worldbuilding reference, for classroom exercises on Markov chains, or as labelled data for a classifier.

Download

all-fantasy-names.csv — every name in one file with columns name, gender, tradition, tradition_label. Or pick individual traditions below (columns name, gender; gender is male, female, or any).

TraditionNamesGenderedCSVGenerator
Elven 252 male / female elf-names.csv open
Dwarven 201 male / female dwarf-names.csv open
Orcish 180 male / female orc-names.csv open
Draconic 137 no dragon-names.csv open
Tiefling 152 male / female tiefling-names.csv open
Dragonborn 122 no dragonborn-names.csv open
Arcane 166 male / female wizard-names.csv open
Halfling 151 male / female halfling-names.csv open
Gnomish 149 male / female gnome-names.csv open
Goblin 131 no goblin-names.csv open
Vampiric 134 male / female vampire-names.csv open
Norse 167 male / female viking-names.csv open
Medieval 183 male / female medieval-names.csv open
D&D Mixed 107 male / female dnd-names.csv open
Fantasy City 120 no city-names.csv open
Fantasy Surname 103 no lastname-names.csv open
Fantasy Pet 156 no pets-names.csv open
Fantasy Kingdom 94 no kingdom-names.csv open

License and Attribution

The corpus is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may copy, modify, and redistribute it, including commercially, as long as you credit the source. A link is the preferred form of credit:

Fantasy name corpus by NamingRealm — https://namingrealm.com/data/ (CC BY 4.0)

If you use it in a paper, tool, or article, we'd genuinely like to hear about it — let us know.

How the Corpus Was Built

Each tradition's list was assembled by hand to capture how that race is conventionally named across Dungeons & Dragons, Tolkien-descended fantasy, and modern worldbuilding — the shared instinct, not any one author's canon. Names were selected for phonetic agreement with the rest of their list: an entry that sounded like it belonged to a different tradition was moved or dropped. Real-world traditions (Norse, Medieval, Halfling) draw on historical naming stock; invented traditions draw on the genre's established sound patterns. The lists are original compilations and do not reproduce any single published name table.

Names are stored as plain strings. No trademarked character names from any specific franchise are intentionally included; if you find one, tell us and it will be removed.

What You Can Do With It

  • Train a name generator. A character-level Markov chain of order 2 gives good results on lists this size — see how ours works.
  • Build a classifier. The tradition column is a clean label; the analyzer is one worked example.
  • Reference tables for the table. Print a tradition's list as a quick NPC name bank for your campaign.
  • Teach. The corpus is small enough to inspect by eye and large enough for real statistics — a good dataset for an introductory NLP or probability exercise.