Cool Name Matching Tool
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When you’re working on coming up with names for characters, particularly characters of a specific ethnic group or age range, you could poke around a bunch of baby naming books or sites to find other names that go along with ones you’ve already picked out.
Or you could check out the Name Matchmaker site. This site lets you add one to three names, and then see what other names might go well with them. I’ve tried this with various combinations of mine and my siblings names, and it definitely suggests other names that were popular around the same time we were born, and in the vague sort of middle-American white family names. (One combination of mine, my brother’s, and my youngest sister’s names DID actually turn up the name of our middle sister!)
You can also tweak various settings if you’re looking for unusual names, names that are common to a specific ethnic group, lengths, popularity, etc. So it seems like a great tool to add to an author’s list of websites, particularly if you (like me) want to have everyone named before you start writing a story!
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