: Re: Thinking About Fantasy Names One of my favorite parts of writing is naming my people/places/systems. I look up synonyms of common words and add prefixes, or base things off of Latin roots, or

@Dunderdale623

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I started out like you, finding synonyms and working with them. But also, I look at languages that have a unique set of vowels and find their word for a feeling, noun or anything that represents my characters. Then I change them to roll easier when said out loud. One of my peoples have names inspired from arabic, one from sanskrit, one from old norse and my own language, norwegian.

Personally, I'm hesitant to use words derived from latin and greek, because when I do that, they look nothing like the rest. And that made quite a challenge when naming my tech. But my world is not earth and it doesn't make sense to me that my characters would use words like telephone, audio, aeroplane and so on in a galaxy where nobody had ever spoken greek or latin.

I love unique names, but they need to be easy to read. For instance, two sisters in my story have long names that looked okay at first. But then I realized they were hard to remember, even for me. I kept the names, but made a story of how they got their names. The sisters insists on shortening it to Sam and Hana. So that's what I as a narrator call them, too.

I tend to look for words that aren't used as much today, but readers will recognize them. Tools from a hundred years ago are excellent even as curse words or insults. And plants have thousands of names to choose from, whether you go for a less common used name or combine two.

Have fun writing :)

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