Hi Product Hunt. I built Kenning because every name generator I tried handed me a plausible-looking word and nothing else. Fine for a throwaway NPC, useless when you need a name you can justify — a clan whose surname means something, a ship named for what it does, a character whose name a reader could look up. So this one shows its work. Ask the Korean generator for a name and you get Park Seongjin, 박성진, with Seong achieve + jin truth underneath it and the surname glossed separately. There are 110 generators — D&D classes, tavern signs, thoroughbreds, starships, real-world traditions — and behind them a reverse dictionary of 12,024 senses you can search by meaning instead of sound: look up "wolf" and see which traditions have a word for it, and what each one builds out of it. Nothing is model-generated. Every fragment was placed by hand, which is slow and is also the only reason the meanings can be trusted at all. It is free, has no ads, no account and no paid tier, and that is not going to change. Two honest weaknesses, because you will find them anyway. A lot of sets still build their names out of English vocabulary rather than the tradition's own — that is the next big piece of work, and the site says so on the page instead of hiding it. And the meanings are researched, which means some were wrong: a Korean reader found that the surname Park was glossed as "a flat grassland" in nine languages, when the hanja means unadorned. That one is fixed. Finding the next one is genuinely the most useful thing anyone can send me. Which naming tradition would you actually use that nobody builds properly? I have a shortlist and no strong opinion yet.

Kenning

113 name generators that tell you what the name means

113 name generators that tell you what the name means