Hello Josiah.Originally Posted by Josiah VE
I got fed up with online generators giving me cheesy things like "Pollycat", "Starwarren" or "Mousefiend", (apologies if there are any members here with those names), so I made a spreadsheet that randomly selects from lists of consonant groups and vowels, with a few conditions built into it to prevent the same vowel or syllable set occurring more than twice in the same generated word. Many of the words it generates are rubbish, but among them I have found a few tiny nuggets of gold, like Ajandrani, and Jerrosar (both of whom are characters in my books)
Here are a couple of screen shots of the active sheets, followed by one of the data sheets. You may also notice that I occasionally end up generating a real name, like Kojak in the first example. This only goes to show that I have the formula some way right. I'd be worried if it never happened. Its also the reason I have to google each of the words I think might be good for a name, to make sure it isn't the name of a real person already - or worse - something obscenely rude in another language (like Codari, which I was politely informed is a huge insult to a man in Polish the other day - or at least the phonetic sound of it is!)
If you look at the formula bar at the top of each spreadsheet you will see that the random selection is done on the data sheets, and the concatenation of those random elements to form the names is done on the name sheets.
If you know of anyone who can turn this into an app, I wouldn't mind sharing the sheets. I have offered the spreadsheet to others before now, but so few people seem to have Excel nowadays that I usually don't bother even telling anyone about it. It just doesn't run on cheaper spreadsheet apps. Its like they don't know what a formula is for!
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EDIT: Here is a page that works by randomly selecting syllables. It was an attempt to iron out those irritating tendencies in the earlier sheets, where two R's or two L's can often appear before and after a single vowel which makes a word relatively awkward on the tongue. The disadvantage of going down the route of random syllables, however, is that it is limited by the syllables you have stored in your data sheet - ie not as versatile as random letters and consonant groups.
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