On the fourth night without sleep, Elizabeth Clarke gave Matthew Hopkins five names. Holt, Jarmara, Vinegar Tom, Sack and Sugar, Newes. She said they were her imps. She was about eighty years old and walked on one leg.
The names reached print two years later, in the pamphlet Hopkins wrote to sell his trade. A witch name generator built on what readers expect from the genre would reject all five of them.
The witch name generator below was built the other way round. Describe a character, pick one of four registers if you want one, and it composes names with a gloss on each.
Alias and accusation: what the records called these women
An assize clerk wrote down what he needed. A given name, a husband’s surname where there was one, and then, often, an alias. Anne Whittle alias Chattox. Elizabeth Southerns alias Demdike.
The alias is the part that matters. It came from a place, a family habit, or a nickname the village was already using, and it stuck because the village used it. Nobody chose it. Nobody thought of it as a witch name, and a clerk with cold hands wrote it into the margin once and never explained it.
Older women were written down as Mother. Agnes Waterhouse, hanged at Chelmsford in 1566, kept a cat she called Satan. Alice Samuel of Warboys went to the gallows in 1593 with her husband, her daughter and her son-in-law. The title marked age, and age was the accusation.
The Pendle cases of 1612 run the same pattern through one family. Demdike died in Lancaster Castle before her trial. A child of nine gave evidence that helped hang her own mother.
Reputation moves through a family faster than land does, and a child inherits an accusation the way she inherits a surname. The changeling name generator works that inheritance from the other end, where the child is what gets left behind.
Four more names get quoted from the same confession, and those are the ones that sound like witches: Elemauzer, Pyewacket, Peck in the Crown, Grizzel Greedigut.
None of them appears in the account printed in 1645, and no witness describes Clarke saying them. Hopkins added them to his own pamphlet two years later and called them names “which no mortal could invent”. Elemauzer turns up a few weeks afterwards as the familiar of another woman, Helen Clarke, spelled Elimanzer.
Almost none of that survives in the names people expect today. Morgana, Raven, Seraphina come from nineteenth-century Gothic and from film; behind them is Greek epic, where Circe and Medea had divine ancestry and a body count. That is where Heroic gets its weight.
Which leaves a rule you can carry straight to the tool. A plain given name, one more word that says what she does or where she stands, and nothing that announces itself. Dark keeps closest to that. The other three are what happens when a story needs the name to carry more than the records ever asked a name to carry.
Salt and spelling: how the generator turns a brief into a name
Two things go in: a sentence in the description box, and a register, which you can skip. Leave the buttons alone and the tool decides for itself.
It is not a dictionary being sampled. The witch name generator sends your sentence and the register name to a language model, which composes names in the grammar the assize clerks used and returns five at a time as Name (word – meaning).
Nothing audits that gloss. The name and its explanation are written in the same pass, so read them as a pair. When the meaning does not survive being looked at, rerun the brief instead of keeping the batch.
Two briefs, two registers. “A widow who sells rain to farmers, and has been paid for it since the drought.” Nature. The names come back in this key: Meg Sallow, where Meg is the shortened Margaret half of England used, and sallow is the willow that grows in wet ground.
“A girl who remembers every funeral in the parish and recites them in order.” Dark. Same key: Annot Vell, Annot the medieval diminutive of Agnes, vell a spring.
A place and a decade in the description do more work than any adjective. “Spooky” narrows nothing. “A widow in a wet parish, 1610” narrows almost everything.
Four registers: choosing a sound before you choose a name
The four buttons each answer the same question: where this woman stands in the village, and what the neighbours have already decided about her. They steer rather than switch. The label travels with your sentence and the names come back leaning that way, so one brief run twice through the witch name generator gives you two different people from the same words.
Heroic
Greek epic and its descendants. Long names, classical first halves, a second half that sounds like a place in England. Cassandra Thornbury reads as someone named for a story and then obliged to live near it. This is the register for the witch whose name is known beyond her own parish. The exiled heavy knight name generator handles the same carrying of a deed in a name, with a sword instead of a familiar.
Mystic
The learned register. Latinate endings, bookish consonants, names that look copied out of a margin. Perpetua Crane. Scholastica Vane. Both sound like women who read more than their neighbours did and let the parish draw its own conclusions. This one goes wrong the moment you use it to signal evil. A woman with a borrowed book is not frightening until the village decides she is. The necromancer name generator pushes the same register further into the open.
Dark
Built from the court books. Plain given names, bynames from a trade or a place, and nothing that announces itself. Alizon Rusk. Mercy Alder. Nell Bracken. The unease has to come from your brief, since the spelling will not supply it. A name that explains the plot leaves the scene with nothing to do.
Nature
Plants, weather, ground. Meg Sallow. Tib Fletcher. Goodith Reed. These belong to women who know which ponds go bad in August and which hedge to cut for a fever. Of the four registers this one has the oldest source material, because most cunning folk worked from what grew inside a day’s walk.
Mixing two registers in one family works better than mixing four. A mother in Dark and a daughter in Mystic read as a change of generation. Four registers across four siblings read as four unrelated people who happen to share a house.
One brief, four registers: the same woman named four ways
Each row takes one description through all four labels. Read across, since the interesting part is how far a single sentence can be pushed. Your own runs will land somewhere else. What travels between the columns is the structure, not these particular names.
| Brief | Heroic | Mystic | Dark | Nature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| a midwife blamed for a stillbirth | Ianthe Marlow | Perpetua Crane | Maud Kellaway | Nell Bracken |
| a girl who remembers every funeral in the parish | Alcestis Vane | Scholastica Vane | Annot Vell | Bess Dunnel |
| a woman who sells rain during a dry August | Danae Corve | Innocentia Rook | Tamsin Orey | Meg Sallow |
| a herbwife whose garden is larger than her house | Iphigenia Sillow | Hildegard Ash | Joan Sillow | Tib Fletcher |
| a widow who keeps her husband’s coat on the hook | Andromache Vell | Constantia Marle | Bess Vell | Clemence Harsh |
| a boy accused of what his mother was accused of | Orion Cale | Ambrose Tey | Robin Cale | Sim Pett |
Nothing in the table ranks the four columns. A quiet column usually leaves the scene more room.
Out loud, on the page, in a set: testing before you commit
Spoken at a table, a name has to survive being said twice without anyone checking a sheet. Four syllables will not survive. Players shorten what they cannot hold, and by the second hour nobody remembers deciding to.
On a page the problem is the eye. A spelling that stops a reader costs you the sentence it sits in. Maren Ashgrave reads straight through. Maren Ashgraue makes a reader back up, and a reader who backs up has left the scene.
In a set, two names with the same ending blur together whatever the women are like, and two that start with the same letter are worse. Run the witch name generator again with a different trade and the roots change on their own, which is cheaper than rewriting the character. The kobold name generator meets the same problem with a warren, where six names share one page of notes.
Keep the rejects. A name cut in chapter two fits the midwife in chapter nine, and a batch kept from the first run saves you the second. If the story wants costume more than record, the witchcore name generator works the aesthetic end of the same vocabulary.
Witch naming, answered
What is a witch name generator?
A tool that composes names for a character you describe, rather than handing back a fixed list. You write a sentence, pick a register if one fits, and it returns names with a gloss on each so you can judge them.
How does the witch name generator decide what to give me?
Your description and the register you picked travel together to a language model, which composes names in the grammar the assize records used. Nothing is drawn from a stored inventory, which is why two runs on one brief come back different.
Can I get something that matches a period or a region?
Put both in the description. “A widow in a wet English parish, 1610” gets closer than “spooky”, because a decade and a county narrow the field more than an adjective does. For the plain end of that record, Dark is nearest.
Is it free, and do I need an account?
Free, no account. Most people run three or four batches before settling, and the early batches are worth keeping for minor characters.
Are the names mine to publish?
Yes. They are composed for your brief rather than taken from a list, so nothing is copied from a published character or a living writer’s invention. A combination this ordinary can still be somebody’s legal name, so treat it as fiction, and run the usual trademark search if it is going on a cover.
