Alien name generator

Choose sounds that fit the creature's body and voice: clicking k and t for insects, hissing s and z for reptiles, flowing l and m for sea creatures. Keep it short enough to read easily, or pick an alien type above to do it in one click.

Many writers take a character or homeworld name and add a group ending such as -i, -an or -ari, so Velora's people become the Veloran. Keep the species name short, because readers will see it often.

In Klingon and Na'vi it marks a glottal stop, the catch in the middle of uh-oh, and real languages do the same: Hawaiian writes it with the ʻokina. In Anne McCaffrey's Pern books it marks letters dropped from a longer name, so F'lar was once Fallarnon. One apostrophe per name keeps it readable.

Sharp sounds such as k, t, z and x, and the vowel i, feel spiky, while b, m, l, o and u feel round. In the bouba/kiki experiments, about 95% of people matched kiki to a jagged shape and bouba to a curvy one, and a 2022 study found the same pull across 25 languages. Spiky names tend to read as menacing, round ones as gentle.

Yes. The names come from original syllable rules and are screened against famous species and characters, so they are free to use in stories, campaigns and games. Search any name before you trademark it.

Not under the current rules. The International Astronomical Union lets the public name some exoplanets, but names must be 4 to 16 characters, without numbers or punctuation, and it excludes contrived, invented names, so every name from this generator would be turned down.

The linguist Marc Okrand, for Star Trek III in 1984, building on a few words James Doohan made up for the first film. He chose sounds that are rare in the world's languages so it would sound alien, and published The Klingon Dictionary in 1985.

From sobaka, the Russian word for dog. George Lucas based the character on his Alaskan Malamute, Indiana, and Wookiee came from an ad-lib in his earlier film THX 1138.

Catalogue codes, mostly. The first pulsar was jokingly nicknamed LGM-1, for little green men, in 1967; the Wow! signal of 1977 is named after the note an astronomer wrote beside it; and BLC1, Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1, was most likely Earth-made interference.

Custom mode lets you set a few options and add a sentence of details. An AI language model then suggests 10 original names, each with how to say it and a suggested meaning, and you can ask for more like any name you like.

For invented names, the meanings are suggestions for your story, not real word origins. AI can make mistakes, so check any claim about a real language before you rely on it.