Greek name generator

Greek names change slowly, because families pass them down. According to the 2021 census figures reported from ELSTAT, Georgios has been the most common man's name every year since 1940, given to 7.58% of boys in 2021, and Maria the most common woman's, at 7.71%. The rest of the 2021 top five were Konstantinos, Ioannis, Dimitrios and Nikolaos, and Eleni, Aikaterini, Ioanna and Vasiliki.

The reason is a strong tradition of naming the first son after his father's father and the second after his mother's, and daughters after the grandmothers, so cousins often share a name and tell themselves apart with different everyday forms. Few people use the formal name day to day:

Every day of the Orthodox year remembers at least one saint, and Greeks named after a saint celebrate on that day with an open house, much like a birthday but without the cake. Friends drop in uninvited with flowers, sweets or wine, and many Greeks say the day feels more important than their birthday. Giorgos celebrates on 23 April, Eleni and Konstantinos together on 21 May, Maria on 15 August and Dimitris on 26 October; names tied to Easter, such as Anastasia, move every year. People whose ancient names have no saint are said to have no name day, or celebrate on All Saints' Day. The tools above list the dates of common names, and the generator adds them to its results.

Most Greek surnames began as a father's name, and hereditary surnames were still rare in the 9th century, starting among Byzantine elites. A woman's surname is the genitive of her father's or husband's, so Mr Yannatos's wife is Mrs Yannatou. Since a 1983 law, a woman keeps her own surname when she marries, though she may use her husband's socially. The ending of a surname often says where a family came from:

Prefixes add a story: Papa- for a priest in the family, Chatzi- for an ancestor who made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Kara-, Turkish for black. The most common surnames, as estimated by Forebears with men's and women's forms counted separately:

An ancient Greek had one name. In official settings he added his father's name in the genitive and, in Athens, his deme, the district where he was enrolled as a citizen. The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names gives the example Alkibiades Kleiniou Skambonides, Alcibiades son of Kleinias, of Skambonidai; abroad he was Alkibiades Kleiniou Athenaios, Athenian. Respectable women were usually named as someone's daughter or wife.

Most names joined two meaningful parts, though not always into a sensible phrase: Philippos is lover of horses, but Xenippos is stranger horse. Gods' own names were not normally given to people before Roman times; parents chose names built on them, such as Apollodoros, gift of Apollo. The LGPN has recorded almost 400,000 ancient Greeks, from the late 8th century BC to about AD 600. The parts the ancient name builder uses:

Greek names have no single English spelling. Γιάννης can be Yannis, Yiannis or Giannis. Greek passports use the ELOT 743 standard, which gives Giannis, and modern scholars write k where Latin wrote c, so Kleisthenes rather than Cleisthenes. In Greek, a name carries one accent mark on its stressed syllable and ends with ς, the final form of sigma, as in Γιώργος Παπαδόπουλος; in capitals the accent is dropped: ΓΙΩΡΓΟΣ ΠΑΠΑΔΟΠΟΥΛΟΣ.