I ran across some useful sources for character names today that I’d like to share.
• Native American names at Writing Adolescent Fiction/Character Names/Native American but be sure to carefully distinguish tribe-appropriate names.
• Wikipedia Category: Surnames a listing of a large number of surnames that can be searched by the first two letters
• White Pages.com, a place where you can see the distribution of a surname across the United States and also find out how popular it is
• Baby Name Data from the Social Security Administration, in case you have a question like: what boys names were popular in the U.S. in the 1890s? Data is available by decade and state, and you can also find popular names for twins.
• Baby Names World, a particularly useful name site because besides searching by name, you can search by a set of letters that appear at the start, end, or anywhere in the name.
Great suggestions for finding character names. Another way that has been used to generate character names are to take the names of neighborhood streets; this was used regularly on cartoons The Proud Family and Fillmore.
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Hi Monique,
Glad you found them useful. Yes, street names is a good idea. Now that you mention that, it’s made me think of the city lists in the back of atlases.
ME