apertamono / nerdy-naming-schemes

Thematic word lists for naming objects automatically

Thematic lists of names

This is a collection of thematic word lists that you could use to name a dozen servers or a few hundred files. The first of these lists were created to name cities in a game, and I think they could be useful in scripts that generate codenames, version labels or stories. There may be other use cases I never heard of. I prefer lists that are ordered naturally, e.g. by size or date, so you don't have to use alphabetical order every time. Many of these lists contain some diacritics and special characters; it's an international collection. Besides general comments at the top, names are not explained, so you can copy a whole list at once, and use it to assign names automatically.

Overview of themes

Filename	Theme	Number of names
Asteroids.txt	Asteroids/minor planets/SSSBs	22,708
BaiJiaXing.txt	Chinese family names	504
Battleships.txt	Historical battleship classes	129
Bible.txt	Bible books	62
Bitcoin.txt	Bitcoin addresses	64
Capitals.txt	National capitals	191
Cities.txt	Largest cities in the world	238
Codes.txt	Codes A0-Z9	260
Coins.txt	Cryptocurrencies (2017)	701
Countries.txt	UN member states	193
Currencies.txt	National and international currencies	77
Elements.txt	Named chemical elements	118
Em.txt	Symbols for named chemical elements	118
Esperanto.txt	Esperanto words	1626
Fish.txt	Common fish names	1083
Forbes2000.txt	Forbes Global 2000 companies (2021)	2000
Gods.txt	Deities	253
Guns.txt	Historical firearms	169
Ice.txt	Words for ice in Yupik	99
Langfam_Austronesian.txt	Language family: Austronesian	1094
Langfam_Niger-Congo.txt	Language family: Niger-Congo	1400
Langfam_Trans-New-Guinea.txt	Language family: Trans-New-Guinea	459
Language_isolates.txt	Isolated languages	88
Names-NL-female.txt	First names for girls in the Netherlands	250
Names-NL-male.txt	First names for boys in the Netherlands	250
Nobel-Lit.txt	Winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature	117
Numbers.txt	Numerals 000-999	1000
Prophets.txt	Prophets according to Islam	25
Stars.txt	The brightest celestial bodies	55
StarTrek.txt	Star Trek characters	204
Surnames-US.txt	Most common surnames in the USA	1000
Tokens.txt	Cryptocurrency tokens (2017)	316
UN.txt	United Nations organs and agencies	40

If you want to add a list, please make a pull request with the new file. I will add the description here. It should be a canonical or comprehensive list representing significant cultural heritage or natural phenomena - not just one person's favorites. I try to represent cultures from across the world, while focusing on Latin text for technical reasons.

History

This collection wasn't started in an office. Do you remember playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri? One of the things that made it an epic game was the characters of the faction leaders, divided not by nationality, but by ideology. The city names, on the other hand, were not as distinctive. It felt like they were all created by a 19th-century poet. Besides, I needed more names on big maps. So I created my own city names, using semantic domains that seemed suitable for each faction.

The themes folder contains the thematic lists in plain text, plus some comments at the start of the file. See the basenames folder in the original namenlijsten repo for the faction files that you'd put in the Alpha Centauri folder. Those lists were a mixture of Dutch and English. This repo is a general collection of thematic word lists in English, not limited to Alpha Centauri factions.

In 2017, cryptocurrencies securing their own blockchain and other tokens were listed separately, but this distinction isn't so clear anymore, and providers of market cap statistics don't separate their rankings into coins and tokens anymore. I'll keep the lists from 2017 for historical interest.

Other collections

I started this collection before I knew the term 'naming scheme'. So I'm not sure whether I know all the relevant sources. Many lists in the collections I found contain explanations and comments, so you can't use them to assign names automatically.

• Code Name Generator
• https://namingschemes.com/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
• The EFF's diceware word lists
• Bitcoin's BIP-39 word lists
• Most popular first names in the Netherlands by year, region and place
• The Book of Lists by David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace and Irving Wallace, 1977 (I have a Dutch translation from 1982).
• Emily's Fantasy Name Generators will give you 10 random names out of countless collections of real and made-up names.
• Nora Zone generates funny names and descriptions (one at a time).