This is a collection of thematic word lists that you could use to name a dozen servers or a few hundred files. The first of these lists were created to name cities in a game, and I think they could be useful in scripts that generate codenames, version labels or stories. There may be other use cases I never heard of. I prefer lists that are ordered naturally, e.g. by size or date, so you don't have to use alphabetical order every time. Many of these lists contain some diacritics and special characters; it's an international collection. Besides general comments at the top, names are not explained, so you can copy a whole list at once, and use it to assign names automatically.
| Filename | Theme | Number of names |
|---|---|---|
| Asteroids.txt | Asteroids/minor planets/SSSBs | 22,708 |
| BaiJiaXing.txt | Chinese family names | 504 |
| Battleships.txt | Historical battleship classes | 129 |
| Bible.txt | Bible books | 62 |
| Bitcoin.txt | Bitcoin addresses | 64 |
| Capitals.txt | National capitals | 191 |
| Cities.txt | Largest cities in the world | 475 |
| Codes.txt | Codes A0-Z9 | 260 |
| Coins.txt | Cryptocurrencies (2017) | 701 |
| Countries.txt | UN member states | 193 |
| Currencies.txt | National and international currencies | 77 |
| Elements.txt | Named chemical elements | 118 |
| Em.txt | Symbols for named chemical elements | 118 |
| Esperanto.txt | Esperanto words | 1626 |
| Fish.txt | Common fish names | 1083 |
| Forbes2000.txt | Forbes Global 2000 companies (2021) | 2000 |
| Gods.txt | Deities | 253 |
| Guns.txt | Historical firearms | 169 |
| Ice.txt | Words for ice in Yupik | 99 |
| Langfam_Austronesian.txt | Language family: Austronesian | 1094 |
| Langfam_Niger-Congo.txt | Language family: Niger-Congo | 1400 |
| Langfam_Trans-New-Guinea.txt | Language family: Trans-New-Guinea | 459 |
| Language_isolates.txt | Isolated languages | 88 |
| Names-NL-female.txt | First names for girls in the Netherlands | 250 |
| Names-NL-male.txt | First names for boys in the Netherlands | 250 |
| Nobel-Lit.txt | Winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature | 117 |
| Numbers.txt | Numerals 000-999 | 1000 |
| Prophets.txt | Prophets according to Islam | 25 |
| Rivers.txt | Largest rivers by discharge | 175 |
| Stars.txt | Brightest celestial bodies | 55 |
| StarTrek.txt | Star Trek characters | 204 |
| Surnames-US.txt | Most common surnames in the USA | 1000 |
| Tokens.txt | Cryptocurrency tokens (2017) | 316 |
| UN.txt | United Nations organs and agencies | 40 |
If you want to add a list, please make a pull request with the new file. I will add the description here. It should be a canonical or comprehensive list representing significant cultural heritage or natural phenomena - not just one person's favorites. I try to represent cultures from across the world, while focusing on Latin text for technical reasons.
I started this collection before I knew the term 'naming scheme'. So I'm not sure whether I know all the relevant sources. Many lists in the collections I found contain explanations and comments, so you can't use them to assign names automatically.
- Code Name Generator
- https://namingschemes.com/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
- The EFF's diceware word lists
- Bitcoin's BIP-39 word lists
- SecLists lists of leaked passwords
- Awesome Public Datasets
- Most popular first names in the Netherlands by year, region and place
- The Book of Lists by David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace and Irving Wallace, 1977 (I have a Dutch translation from 1982).
- Emily's Fantasy Name Generators will give you 10 random names out of countless collections of real and made-up names.
- Nora Zone generates funny names and descriptions (one at a time).
This collection wasn't started in an office. Do you remember playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri? One of the things that made it an epic game was the characters of the faction leaders, divided not by nationality, but by ideology. The city names, on the other hand, were not as distinctive. It felt like they were all created by a 19th-century poet. Besides, I needed more names on big maps. So I created my own city names, using semantic domains that seemed suitable for each faction.
The themes folder contains the thematic lists in plain text, plus some comments at the start of the file. See the basenames folder in the original namenlijsten repo for the faction files that you'd put in the Alpha Centauri folder. Those lists were a mixture of Dutch and English. This repo is a general collection of thematic word lists in English, not limited to Alpha Centauri factions.
In 2017, cryptocurrencies securing their own blockchain and other tokens were listed separately, but this distinction isn't so clear anymore, and providers of market cap statistics don't separate their rankings into coins and tokens anymore. I'll keep the lists from 2017 for historical interest.