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Pirate Ship Name Generator

This page opens the fantasy name generator on its Pirate ship style, so the Pirate ship chip is already the pressed one when the page loads and the grid fills with vessel names, whatever style you last used here. Every result names the ship and never the crew: The Bloody Flotsam, Gunwale's Fortune, The Widow of Holystone, The Merry Seadog of Sorrow. Three short lists written into this style and shared with no other do all of it: 44 stems out of the vocabulary of a working deck, halyard, cutlass, mizzen, holystone, jollyboat, kedge, gunwale, orlopdeck and the rest; 8 moods, Bloody, Wayward, Drowned, Gallows, Merry, Ravenous, Sullen and Lucky; and 8 nouns, Revenge, Fortune, Maiden, Gale, Lantern, Widow, Sorrow and Harvest. There are no prefixes and no endings in this style, and the invented word is a single stem at every setting, so Length is not a size dial: it is the grammar control. Short gives the two plainest forms, The Bloody Flotsam and Gunwale's Fortune, and can make 704 different names; Medium adds a third, The Widow of Holystone, for 1,056; Long swaps the plain pairing for the full form, The Merry Seadog of Sorrow, and reaches 3,168. Under each name is a reading cue for the invented word, cut at the joins the generator made, so Holystone reads HO-lys-tone and Privateer reads PRI-va-teer. Up to a hundred names a press, a star to keep the ones you want, a seed word to make a fleet repeatable, and nothing you type leaves the browser.

Building names

Style
Pirate ship
Length

The chips choose the style, and each one is a different syllable set: Pirate ship builds place and thing 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.

A seed word makes a run repeatable. Type one and this style and length return the same names in the same order, on any machine, so a session you planned last week comes back unchanged. Leave it empty and every press draws fresh from the browser’s cryptographic generator. Nothing you type is uploaded, and we place no restriction on using the names you keep.

Common questions

Does this name the ship or the captain?
The ship. Pirate ship is a place and thing style, so what it builds is the grammar of a vessel: an article, a mood word, an invented ship word and sometimes a noun hung on the end, as in The Drowned Mizzen or Kedge's Widow. Nobody's alias ever comes out of it. The Pirate style, a separate chip in the same row, is the one that names people, and the two share nothing: different stems, different word banks, not one plain word in common. Switch between them and your length, count and seed word stay where they are, so the same seed word will name a fleet to go with a crew.
How many different ship names can it make?
704 at Short, 1,056 at Medium and 3,168 at Long, counted from the lists themselves: 44 stems against 8 moods gives 352 for The Bloody Flotsam, and 44 against 8 nouns gives another 352 for Gunwale's Fortune, which is Short. Medium keeps both and adds The Widow of Holystone for a third 352. Long drops the plain pairing and puts a noun on the end of the mood form, 8 moods by 44 stems by 8 nouns, which is 2,816, plus the 352 possessives it keeps. One press makes up to 100 of them, and inside a press the draw retries any name it has already made, so a grid of 100 came back with 100 different names in every test run of it.
What does the Length control change?
The grammar around the ship word, not the length of the word. This style has no prefixes and no endings, and every name is built on a single stem whichever setting you are on, so Short is not a shorter word than Long. Short draws evenly from two shapes, The Bloody Flotsam and Gunwale's Fortune. Medium spreads over three, adding The Widow of Holystone. Long trades the plain pairing for the fuller one, so the grid arrives as The Merry Seadog of Sorrow and Undertow's Maiden. Because the length is part of the draw, the same seed at a different length gives a different fleet rather than a trimmed one.
Where do the ship words come from?
They were written for this style and they live in this page's own source file: 44 stems, 8 mood words and 8 nouns, and no other style here draws on any of them. The stems are ordinary sea vocabulary rather than borrowed names, which is why bosun, capstan, ensign and longboat sit in there next to grapnel and nightglass. The tests that ship with the generator check every stem and thousands of generated names against a list of 66 well-known characters and places from books, films and games, and no stem carries a meaning or an etymology, because a stem here is a sound rather than a gloss. A name can still fall near a real one by chance, and whether a particular name already belongs to a boat, a book or a trademark is not something this page can know.
Can I get the same fleet of ship names back later?
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 fleet you rolled for last week comes back unchanged and you can hand the rest of a table the seed word instead of the list. 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. Length, count and seed word are remembered in this browser and come back as you left them.
What is the small line under each name?
A reading cue for the invented word, in that word's own letters, cut at the joins the generator made, with one syllable in capitals for the stress: Holystone reads HO-lys-tone, Privateer reads PRI-va-teer and Gunwale reads GUN-wale. It covers the invented word only, so the written words around it, The, Bloody, Fortune, are left alone rather than guessed at. No letter is ever respelled, which keeps the cue a reading aid rather than a claim about how any language would say the word.
Does reading this page change the fantasy name generator?
No. The style is the one thing this page sets, and it sets it here only: until you press a style chip yourself, the style written back to this browser stays the one you last chose on the tool page, so that page still opens where you left it. Ask for between 1 and 100 names a press; 101 comes back with a message rather than a trimmed grid. Names you star are kept in this tab and go when you close it, and nothing you type is uploaded or needs an account.

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.