Pirate Name Generator
This page opens the fantasy name generator on its Pirate style, so pirate names are on screen before you touch anything, whatever style you last used here. What comes back is an alias for a person, the shape history hands down: Edward Teach is remembered as Blackbeard and John Rackham as Calico Jack, a name with something hung on it. The pirate set is 44 syllable stems written for this style and shared with no other, taken from the vocabulary of a working deck: bilge, gaff, jib, keel, oakum, orlop, purser, scupper, tarr and yawl among them, three to seven letters each, starting on every letter but x. There are no prefixes and four endings, ey, ard, een and ock, and about one invented word in three takes one, which is how brisk becomes Briskey and zeb becomes Zebeen. The word itself is a single stem at every setting, so Length is not a size dial here: it chooses the grammar around the word, and it is the nickname control. Short always pairs the name with one of eight bynames, Saltmouth, Blackcuff, Windward, Rumwake, Ironhook, Greytide, Longshadow or Coldanchor, as in Welk Windward. Medium spreads the draw evenly over three shapes: that pairing, the article form Hobbs the Saltmouth, and the quoted nickname Tarr 'Brine' Zeb, where a second invented word follows the nickname. Long drops the bare pairing, so about half the grid comes back with a quoted nickname and the rest with the article, Vex the Saltmouth. Ships are a separate style further along the same chip row, near the end of it, Pirate ship, with its own stems and its own grammar: The Bloody Flotsam, Bosun's Revenge. Under every name is a reading cue for the first invented word, cut at the joins the generator made. Up to a hundred names a press, a star to keep the ones you want, a seed word to make the run repeatable, and nothing you type leaves the browser.
Building names
The chips choose the style, and each one is a different syllable set: Pirate builds character names. Type a seed word to make a run repeatable, or leave it empty for a fresh set every press. The line under each name is a reading cue for the invented word the name is built on, cut at the joins the generator used.
Common questions
- How were pirate nicknames actually formed?
- By other people, and usually from something anyone on deck could see: a garment, a habit, a trade, a stretch of coast. Edward Teach is remembered as Blackbeard, and John Rackham as Calico Jack for the cloth he dressed in, while a man who wanted his own name kept quiet had every reason to answer to something else. The two written lists on this page follow the two shapes those names take. A byname stands straight after the personal name, or after the word the, which is the Blackbeard pattern packed into a single word: Saltmouth, Blackcuff, Windward, Rumwake, Ironhook, Greytide, Longshadow and Coldanchor, each one a thing off a ship rather than a surname. A quoted nickname is the other shape, the one a crew used to somebody's face, so it sits between two names: Ransom 'Lanterns' Jib, Emlin 'Sixfinger' Flintock. Those sixteen plain words were written for this style and none is presented as historical. Copper is the only one that also appears in another style's list, the Code name bank.
- How do I get a name for a captain rather than an ordinary crew member?
- Use the Length control, because it changes the grammar rather than the size of the word. Long is the captain end: the plain pairing drops out of the draw, so every name arrives either as the article form, Vex the Saltmouth or Yawl the Longshadow, which reads as a title, or as a quoted nickname between two names, Jib 'Mackerel' Jasper. Short is the crew end: an invented word and a byname, Gaff Windward or Ishamock Rumwake, no article and no quotes. Medium mixes all three shapes in roughly equal thirds, which is the setting to use when you want a whole roster of mixed ranks in one grid. Nothing in the tool marks a rank, so this is a choice about the shape of the name and not a field you are filling in. Because Length is part of the draw, the same seed at a different length gives a different list rather than a trimmed one, so generate the captain and the crew as two separate presses and star the ones you want.
- Are the pirate ship names here too?
- They are, under a different chip. This page is the Pirate style, and it builds people: every result is somebody's alias, never a vessel or a port. The Pirate ship style sits further along the same chip row at the top of the stage, near the end of the 31 styles, with its own 44 stems, halyard, cutlass, mizzen, holystone, jollyboat and the rest, and its own grammar: The Bloody Flotsam, Bosun's Revenge, The Wayward Ebbtide, and at Long the fuller form, The Merry Ensign of Gale. The two lists share nothing, so a captain's alias from this page can never come back as a ship's name from that one. Switch the chip and the length, count and seed word stay where they are, so the same seed word will name a fleet to go with a crew.
- Are these names invented, or taken from a book, a film or a game?
- They are invented here. Every stem, ending, byname and nickname in the pirate set was written for this tool and lives in this repository, and the tests that ship with the generator check the whole corpus, and thousands of generated names, against a list of well-known characters and places from books, films and games. The stems are ordinary sea vocabulary rather than borrowed names, which is why Keel, Mast and Flint can turn up plain and then come back as Keelock or Flintey once an ending lands. A name can still fall close to a real one by chance, because there are only so many ways to arrange these sounds, and no stem is given a meaning or an etymology by the tool. We place no restriction on using a name you generate. What we cannot tell you is whether a particular string is already a trademark or a known character somewhere, so a name you plan to put on a cover is worth a search first.
- Can I get the same pirate names back tomorrow?
- Type a word into Seed word. The same seed with the same style and the same length returns the same names in the same order, on this machine and on any other, so a crew you rolled for last week comes back unchanged, and you can hand the rest of a table the seed word instead of the list. The style is part of that, and this page starts on Pirate however you last left the tool. Leave the seed empty and every press of Generate draws fresh from the browser's cryptographic generator, which cannot be replayed, and a seed of only spaces counts as empty. The length, count and seed word are remembered in this browser, so those three come back as you left them, while this page opens on Pirate whichever style you last used. The Start over button at the top of the page forgets them.
- What is the small line under each name, and why does the second name not have one?
- It is a reading cue for the invented word the name is built on, in that word's own letters, cut at the joins the generator made, with one syllable in capitals for the stress: Mordantard reads mor-dant-ARD and Lurcher reads LUR-cher. It covers the first invented word only. The plain words are left alone rather than guessed at, so Hobbs the Saltmouth is read back as HOBBS and nothing else, and in the quoted form, Emlin 'Sixfinger' Flintock, the cue is EM-lin and the second invented word carries none. No letter is ever respelled, which keeps the cue a reading aid rather than a claim about how any language would say the word.
Every syllable set here is written for this tool and assembled by rule, so a name can land near a real one by chance but is never copied from a published character list. The pronunciation cue is built from the same syllables, so it is a reading aid rather than a claim about any language.