Namaker is a name generator program, and although it was originally intended for the generation of my artist name, it is able to generate any kind of name. Looking for a name for your first born? Looking for a name for your new secret club? Or for yet another weblog or amateur movie? Namaker is there to help.
I should be honest and admit that my artist name, ‘Pels’, was not generated by Namaker. The names it generated where pretty good at times, but ultimately failed to meet my high standards.
Namaker follows certain rules when generating its names. The core of these rules is based on a (very simple) knowledge of written language: Namaker can analyze texts and see how often certain groups of consonants or groups of vowels occur in those texts. This ‘knowledge’ is used by the program to decide what characters are allowed to follow each other in the generated names.
By default, Namaker comes with some standard knowledge, based on Dutch texts. The generated results will adhere to Dutch vocabulary. By erasing this base knowledge and inputting all kinds of other texts, you can generate very specific kinds of names, such as Lord of the Rings-like names, Klingon names, Icelandic names or whatever.
Namaker was programmed in Java and works on every platform. You do need the (correct version of) Java to start it. (Download Java here).