Fake Name Generator

How the fake name generator builds a full name

Each origin has its own lists of male first names, female first names and last names. American has 25 of each, and the other nine origins (British, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Russian) have 20 of each. A French name only pairs a French first name with a French surname, never an Italian one.

With gender on Any, the first name is drawn from the male and female lists together. That gives 1,250 possible American full names, 800 for each other origin and 8,450 in all. Every draw uses the browser's cryptographic random generator, as described in how our randomness works.

Mixed/International works differently. For each name in your batch it first picks one of the ten origins at random, then a name from that origin's lists, so one batch of five might hold a German name and a Japanese name side by side.

Example: three American names, and how often names repeat

American with gender on Any and a count of 3 might return Robert Garcia, Sarah Thompson, Michael Rodriguez. Each name is drawn independently, and the tool does not track what it has already produced.

Repeats therefore turn up sooner than most people expect, which is the birthday problem. From 1,250 American names, a batch of 10 has about a 3.5% chance of containing one name twice, and a batch of 50 about 63%. On Mixed/International the pool is larger, and a batch of 50 holds a repeat about 14% of the time.

How to set origin, gender and count

1. Choose an origin, or Mixed/International for a new origin on every name.
2. Set gender to Male or Female to limit first names to that list, or leave it on Any to draw from both.
3. Enter how many names you want, from 1 to 50, and press Generate Names.
4. Press Copy All Names to copy the batch, one name per line.

Using fake names for test data and stories

Typical uses are user tables in a test database, a character roster for a game or story, and placeholder names that replace real customers in a demo. For more control over one part of the name, the first name generator filters by style and the last name generator has 15 surname lists.

The names are ordinary ones, so a generated name can match a real person by coincidence. The American surname list includes all ten of the most common surnames in the 2010 US census, from Smith to Martinez.

For contact details that cannot reach anyone, use the test data generator, or the random email generator for addresses alone. The name generator covers the same ten origins and can also give first or last names on their own.