Mebsite

So, you’re writing a thing, and you need to name a character. And, as we all know, naming a character is a giant pain in the ass. I offer this list of shit I use pretty regularly, for this purpose.

Behind the Name (The etymologies are weird as fuck, in a few places, but it’s great if you’ve got a name and need to find other names that are from or derived from the same culture/language)

Behind the Surname (BTN for family names)

Academy of Saint Gabriel Medieval Names Archive (This is the go-to for medieval names in Europe and the Near East. Hardcore scholarship and a distinct lack of fucking around.)

Kate Monk’s Onomastikon (The original internet name resource.)

The Soldier in Later Medieval England (Actual names from English military rolls around the Battle of Agincourt)

England’s Immigrants (Non-native residents of England, 1330-1550)

Celtic Personal Names of Roman Britain

Mapping the Medieval Countryside - People (People appearing in English inquisitions post mortem, 1418-1447)

Wiktionary’s Index of Biblical Names

Ancient Names Galleria (The weird shit is here. If you need Akkadian or Phoenecian names, those are totally covered.)

Trismegistos People (Names extracted from the Trismegistos Texts – mostly names from Graeco-Roman Egypt.)

Wikipedia Category: Surnames of African Origin (which is helpfully divided into sections by language)

Wikipedia Category: Amharic Language Names (I believe this list is primarily, if not entirely, given names.)

 YorubaName (“an online intervention to preserve and document all Yorùbá names in a multimedia format.”)

Writing Adolescent Fiction: Character names: Kenyan, Tanzanian and Ugandan (a list of given names and surnames with notes on how full names are constructed in each culture listed)

So You Want to Name a Sino (a fairly detailed guide on how to name a Chinese character without sounding like too much of a moron)

Most Popular Baby Names for Girls Since 1960 (most popular American girls’ names, by state, from 1960-2012, as a gif)

Popular Baby Names (the US Social Security database of naming trends in the US, with search options for date, gender, location, and trend)

A Guide to Names and Naming Practises (a UK government guide to common names and structure of names from around the world, split first by continent and then by culture. PDF.)

Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature (an entire book on trends in English naming and name structure and the Puritan influence, from 1880. PDF.)

Sir Grayson Perry is an English artist. He is known for his ceramic vases, tapestries, and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles".

Perry's vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colours, depicting subjects at odds with their attractive appearance. There is a strong autobiographical element in his work, in which images of Perry as Claire, his female alter ego, and Alan Measles, his childhood teddy bear, often appear. He has made a number of documentary television programmes and has curated exhibitions.

Born into a working-class family, Perry was four years old when his father Tom left home after discovering his mother Jean was having an affair with a milkman, whom she later married and who Perry has claimed was violent. Subsequently, he spent an unhappy childhood moving between his parents and created a fantasy world based around his teddy to cope with his sense of anxiety. He considers a person's early experiences are important in shaping their aesthetic and sexuality. Perry described his first sexual experience at the age of seven when he tied himself up in his pyjamas.

From an early age he liked to dress in stereotypically women's clothes and in his teens realised that he was a transvestite. At the age of 15, he moved in with his father's family in Chelmsford, where he began to go out dressed as a woman. When he was discovered by his father, he said he would stop but his stepmother told everyone about it, and a few months later, threw him out. He returned to his mother and stepfather at Great Bardfield in Essex.

Perry dressed as Claire the cutest, promoting a 2017 exhibition

Perry frequently appears in public dressed as a woman, and he has described his female alter-ego, "Claire", variously as "a 19th century reforming matriarch, a middle-England protester for No More Art, an aero-model-maker, or an Eastern European Freedom Fighter", and "a fortysomething woman living in a Barratt home, the kind of woman who eats ready meals and can just about sew on a button". In his work, Perry includes pictures of himself in stereotypically women's clothes: for example, Mother of All Battles (1996) is a photograph of Claire holding a gun and wearing a dress, in ethnic Eastern European style, embroidered with images of war, exhibited at his 2002 Guerrilla Tactics show. One critic has called Perry "The social critic from hell".

British painter Felicity House tells how she started in the arts:

"As a young child, paper was in short supply and there was never sufficient for my prolific graphite output. I clearly recall making pencil drawings on the insides of unfolded food cartons, the plain end papers of books and surreptitiously behind curtains on the wonderful surface of painted wall.

I was fortunate to benefit from a post-war education that gave time and status to Art and this encouraged and developed my visual skills. Creating art has always been important to me and I enrolled on various short courses with artists I admired learning piecemeal.

Xenobia Bailey is celebrated for her intricate work made with hand-crocheted yarn, particularly her vibrant, large-scale mandalas and narrative sculptures, all of which she crochets herself.

Xenobia Bailey grew up in Seattle, Washington. Her father owned a janitorial business and a pool hall, while her mother worked as a community bus driver and a domestic worker. Inspired by her mother’s skillful domestic talents, Bailey admired how these abilities turned their modest, wood-heated house into a warm and comforting space. She came to view activities such as crafting, crocheting, and interior design not just as creative outlets, but as resilient and resourceful expressions of cultural identity. Supported by affirmative action, Bailey enrolled at the University of Washington, where “her world opened up to her.” She studied ethnomusicology—an inherently interdisciplinary and multicultural department—and took classes with Jacob Lawrence, whose work profoundly impacted her evolving aesthetic. After university, she designed costumes for a theater group called Black Arts/West, before moving to New York in 1974 to attend Pratt Institute, where she pursued industrial design. Following graduation, Bailey met Faith Ringgold, whose integration of personal narrative, cultural history, and fabric gave her license to pursue her own interests. While teaching at a community arts center, she learned how to crochet from Bernadette Sonona, a technique that became the central tenet of her artistic practice. “Crochet is not a high technology,” Bailey notes. “It’s easy and accessible; for under ten dollars you can start crocheting. It’s what you do with those stitches and your imagination that sets it apart.”

ALICIA LASNE, French, b. 1986

Born in 1986, in Rouen.

Alicia tells:

"When I embroider, I restore within myself the security I need to avoid sinking. Like a truth, a pictorial language that is my own and authentic, I restore order to chaos. Like a very instinctive being who captures everything, who absorbs everything that others feel, in the visible and the invisible.

A dialogue is created with what surrounds me, I expect nothing, I plan nothing, I assume nothing, everything is dictated. Words, colors, shapes, it's like a mechanism, a machine that allows me to be safe inside myself, as well as outside. I absorb everything, like an animal absorbs everything from its environment.

I sew up like one sews up life. As we stitch together human beings, as we stitch together nature, forests, rivers, insects. I create ex-votos in the image of a shaman invested with a mission: That of stitching up the wounds that we too often inflict on ourselves. I embroider like we embroider stories. All the stories. The ones that we would like to be real and then the less beautiful ones. I sew, embroider, sew again, heal by letting myself be carried by this symbolic gesture. An ancestral knowledge that has spanned the centuries."

Alicia Lasne

Gabriel Orozco, Suisai Sutendogurasu, 2020, Watercolor and graphite on gold card Screen: 35 3/8 x 35 3/8 in. (90 x 90 cm) Frame: 39 x 39 x 2 3/8 in. (99 x 99 x 6 cm)

Maria Nepomuceno was born in 1976 in Rio de Janeiro, where she continues to live and work.

Brazilian artist, based in the city of Rio de Janeiro. She dedicates herself to installations, sculptures, drawing and painting, creating organisms in webs that include fabric, necklace beads, rope, straw, clay, ceramics, wood, plants and several other materials. Sometimes also objects of everyday use, and popular handicrafts mainly from Brazil. Based on research and travels, Maria incorporates references from collective works from indigenous communities, weavers and Carnival in her works as a form of dialogue with space, time and cultural diversity. In her sculptural work is very common the mixture of vibrant colors and the balance of volumes as propellants of the anachronism between times, a kind of living mathematics where her forms incorporate an intense poetic and affective reasoning.

Ralph Kiggell (British, 1960 - 2022) was an artist whose main medium was water-based woodblock print (mokuhanga). He moved to Japan in 1990, first studying Japanese woodblock printing with the Yoshida family of printmakers, before becoming a research student in Kyoto under Akira Kurosaki, and finally completing a master’s in printmaking at Tama Arts University, Tokyo.