Ship Name Generator
Type two names and the blends are on the first screen, already ranked: Ben and Jennifer give Bennifer, Harry and Meghan give Megharry, Chris and Isabel give Chrisabel. Every blend here is a cut rather than a guess. Each name is split only where it can be split, at a syllable boundary or at the edge of a vowel run, and where the two names share letters that run is kept once and marked as shared. Both orders are tried, a seam that knots three consonants neither name contains is dropped instead of shown, and so is a two-consonant seam unless one of the names has it or it closes on l, m, n, r or s, and what survives is ranked by how pronounceable those rules judge it. Three lengths filter that one ranked list rather than redrawing it: short keeps under three fifths of the letters between them, long keeps nearly all of them, and the three counts always add up to the pool. Each row shows the blend with every piece coloured by the name it came from and names the cut it used, so nothing about the assembly is hidden. Star the blends you like, copy one or copy the list, or export it with the working beside each name. Names of up to 32 letters are accepted, anything longer is refused rather than quietly shortened, accented letters stay whole, and nothing you type is uploaded or measured.
13 balanced blends for Ben + Jennifer. Best: Ben from Ben, nifer from Jennifer.
Both names blend in both orders. Shuffle takes a fresh seed, which nudges blends of similar quality past each other: the seed changes the order, never the list, and an empty seed is the plain ranking. Nothing you type is uploaded or measured, and the browser remembers the two names here until you press Start over.
- from Ben
- from Jennifer
- letters both names share
Common questions
- What is a ship name?
- It is one name made out of two, the way Ben and Jennifer became Bennifer: fans of a couple, real or fictional, blend the two names into a single word and use it as shorthand. This page is that job and only that job. You give it two names, it cuts them where the spelling allows a cut, joins the pieces both ways round and shows you what it can make. It has no opinion about the two people and no list of celebrity couples: everything you see is built out of the two names you typed.
- How does it decide where to cut the names?
- Each name is split into syllables by the ordinary spelling rule: every syllable owns a vowel run, a single consonant between two vowels opens the next syllable, and two or more consonants give one letter to the syllable before them, so Jennifer breaks as Jen-ni-fer. A name may be cut at any of those boundaries and at the start or the end of a vowel run, which is where Bennifer, Benjen and Benjennifer all come from. Letters the two names share are a cut of their own: Chris ends with the letters Isabel starts with, so Chrisabel keeps that run once and marks it as shared. A seam that would leave three consonants in a row that neither name contains is refused outright, and so is a two-consonant seam that neither name has unless it closes on l, m, n, r or s, which English allows: banjo, winter, Benjen. Those are docked rather than refused. The ranking then prefers cuts the name itself offers, shared letters, two to four syllables and a name kept whole.
- What do short, balanced and long change?
- They filter one ranked list by how much of the two names survives into the blend. Short keeps under three fifths of the letters you typed, long keeps more than about eighty-five percent, and balanced is everything in between, which is why Ben and Jennifer give Benjen, Bennifer and Benjennifer under the three settings. The three counts always add up to the whole pool, so switching lengths shows a different part of one answer rather than starting again. A length can be empty: Anna and Noah are too short to lose two fifths of their letters, so the short list says so and tells you how many blends the other two lengths hold. When a length holds more than 24 blends, the 24 best are shown and the line under the controls says how many there were.
- What does the seed do, and can I get the same list back?
- With the seed box empty you get the plain ranking, and the same two names always give the same list in the same order. Type a seed, or press Shuffle for a fresh four-digit one, and blends of similar quality are nudged past each other: the seed changes the order and never the set, so the same blends are still there. Type a seed back in and that pair returns that order on this machine and on any other. Only the surrounding spaces and the letter case are ignored, so a seed can be read out loud, and a seed longer than 120 characters is refused with a message rather than quietly cut.
- Why did it refuse one of my names?
- Each name needs at least 2 letters and at most 32, and a longer one is refused rather than trimmed, because a name that came back shortened would blend into something you never typed. Digits, emoji and other symbols are refused with the character shown back to you, so you can see which one it means. Spaces, hyphens and apostrophes are welcome and simply do not reach the blend: Mary-Jane and O'Neil give Maryjaneil. Every refusal says what went wrong and what to do about it, and it appears the moment the box is empty or wrong rather than after a button press.
- Does it handle accents and names in other alphabets?
- Accented letters are safe. Names are split into whole characters, so an accent never gets separated from its letter whether it arrived as one character or as a letter plus a combining mark, and Zoe with an umlaut blends with Andre with an acute into Zoedre with both marks intact. The cutting rules themselves read Latin spelling: they work out vowels and syllables from the letters a e i o u and y. A name written in another script is accepted, but the tool will usually report that it cannot find a pronounceable blend rather than produce something it cannot judge.
- Does the tool rate the couple?
- No, and it never will. The only number in the page is how pronounceable the letter rules judge a blend to be, which decides the order the blends are listed in. There is no compatibility score, no percentage and nothing about the two people at all. It is a name toy: what it can tell you is which blends read like a word, and what it cannot tell you is anything about a relationship.
- Is anything I type uploaded, and are my blends saved?
- Nothing is uploaded and no account is asked for: the cutting and the ranking run in this tab, and the two names are not sent to any analytics. The two names, the length, the seed and up to 50 starred blends are remembered in this browser so the page opens where you left it, and the Start over button at the top of the page forgets all of it. Copy takes the whole visible list one per line, Export adds the pieces each blend came from beside it, and the star button keeps a blend in the list below.
Blends are cut at syllable boundaries and at shared letters, and each result highlights which part came from which name. It ranks by how pronounceable the blend is and scores nothing about the people: it is a name toy, not a compatibility test.