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House Name Generator

Dynasty names for a fantasy world: a surname a family could hold for four hundred years, a seat to hold it from, and a beast to put on the banner.

A house name has to do something a personal name does not: it has to still work when it is four centuries old and half the people saying it hate the family. That rules out anything clever. The names that last are made of landscape and weather — Brackmoor, Fenwarden, Yarrowdown — because the family was named for a place and the place does not care what the family did.

Three shapes come out of this generator, and they are not interchangeable. House Something is a family. The Somethings of Somewhere is how their rivals refer to them. House of the Beast is older and grander and slightly ridiculous, which is exactly right for a dynasty that has been powerful long enough to stop explaining itself.

How this generator works

A plain house name; a house named with its seat; the older "House of the <em>beast</em>" style mined from the game's own banners; and the form a neighbour would use — "the Herons of Saltreach".

A pattern is picked first, then each of its slots is filled from a word pool, and no pool is ever drawn from twice inside the same name — which is what stops the tool handing you Duty Before Duty. Everything happens in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere, and there is nothing to sign up to.

Where the beasts come from

The animal names in the "House of the …" pattern are the ones actually flying on banners in this site's own strategy game — the Wolf, the Lion, the Stag, the Falcon, the Kraken, the Rose, the Trout, the Sun — plus a couple of dozen more in the same key. They are read out of the game's own lore data rather than retyped, so the two can never drift apart.

How to choose between two good ones

Say both aloud in a sentence a servant would say: "The Lady of House Ithwold is at the gate." If one of them makes you stumble, that is the one your players will mangle for a year.

Sixty more, generated when this page was built

Baked into the HTML so there is something here for a reader with JavaScript switched off — and so you can skim a lot of options at once rather than clicking sixty times.

Can I use these names?

Yes — for anything, including commercial work, with no permission and no credit required. Short strings like a name or a two-word motto are not the kind of thing anyone can own, and the crest you compose is your composition, not ours. Take it to a novel, a tabletop campaign, a stream overlay, a band, a boat, a business card.

We ask for exactly nothing in return: no account, no email, no sign-up, no watermark. Nothing you type or click here is sent anywhere — every one of these tools runs entirely inside your own browser, so there is no server that could keep your design even if it wanted to. If you want to tell somebody where it came from, a link back is kind, but it is not a condition.

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