Halfling Name Generator

Homely names for small folk

Halfling names should sound like home: a warm kitchen, a full larder, a village where everyone knows everyone. Our halfling grammar is built like old English country nicknames, short and soft, with a beginning such as Cob-, Tam-, Pip- or Nell- and an ending such as -o, -y, -kin, -ie or -etta. Stress falls on the first syllable, as it does in most nicknames. This page's list opens with Semel of Oat Hall (SEH-mel).

Names stay between three and nine letters. Rules stop awkward joins (no -ckb-, no stray -sr-) and limit w, y and ll to once per name, so a name never turns into a tongue-twister.

Hearth and gentry

• Hearth names are the everyday ones: two syllables, quick to call across a field. Tam, Cobby, Nellie and their cousins.
• Gentry names belong to the families with a hall, a library and an opinion about everybody else's manners: longer, more formal names ending in -ina, -ella, -ard, -ric or -ibald.

The difference is useful in a story. A gentry halfling who insists on their full name and a hearth halfling who has never been called anything but a nickname make a natural pair.

Family names

Halfling families take comfortable compounds of a food, plant or household word and a homely place word (a mead, a brook, a kettle, a barrel), of the something Kin for close clans, a hall for the gentry, or a village with an -end, -green or -lane. We kept away from the -foot and -buck style made famous by one very well-known series of novels, so your halflings sound like your own.