250+ Fantasy Character Names, Sorted by Kind

Decide the sound before the meaning. Readers infer culture from phonetics long before they learn anything about it — a name full of long vowels and soft consonants reads as elven whether or not you have written a single word about elves. Pick the group that sounds right, then choose within it.

Yes, and this is the most common thing to get wrong. Real naming traditions share sounds: if your dwarves are Thrain, Dagnar and Korrin, a dwarf called Aelith will read as a mistake. Consistency within a group does more for believability than any individual name choice.

Ordinary given names cannot be owned, and the invented ones here are free to use in your own work. A handful are drawn from mythology and folklore, which is public domain. Avoid anything strongly associated with a specific published work — a name is fine, a name plus that character's traits is not.

Load one group onto the wheel and spin. For a party of characters, turn on Auto-Remove so each spin takes its result off the wheel — you get a full set with no repeats, which is exactly what you want when naming a group at once.