This is the first installment in a series featured weekly on Tuesdays.

Character customization in WoW is pretty limited to face, skin and hair color, hair styles, and sometimes accessories such as jewelry or facial markings. Some races and genders only have a handful of options, while others have three times as many. Even so, you will at some point run into a character that looks just like yours. The only way we truly can be unique snowflakes in WoW is with our character’s name.

In this week’s installment, we’ll talk about creating names from personal inspiration.

Your Name

Yes, you can use your own name as a foundation for your character’s name. Let’s say your name is Bob. Sure, you can name your character Bob. But we are here to discuss how your character can be a unique snowflake by giving them a unique name. Bob is not a unique snowflake name.

So your name is Bob, most likely the short form of Robert, as Behind the Name can verify. Well, we can stop here and creatively reverse Robert to come up with Trebor. However, a quick look at the armory and we see that Trebor is not a unique snowflake.

We can phonetically change Bob into Bahb. Checking the armory shows us that Bahb is more of a unique snowflake than Trebor, but not entirely unique.

Depending on how unique you want your character’s name to be, Trebor or Bahb may be just fine with you, as long as they aren’t already taken and being used on your character’s server.

Returning to Behind the Name, and drilling down to Robert, we learn a little about the origin and history of Robert. It means “bright fame” and is derived from the Germanic elements hrod (fame) and beraht (bright). Cool! Let’s have a look at the armory:

Hrod - 11 characters found
Beraht - 2 characters found

Well Bob, here we have not one, but two fine choices for your character’s name. If you don’t like either, you can reverse them: Dorh or Thareb. You can create variations until you find one that fits your character: Hrodd, Hrohd, Hrahd, Hrawd, Hrodie, or Berot, Biraht, Beeraht, Berahwt, Boraht, Borat. Heh heh, I kid with that last one.

Alternatively, combining the two could result in the name for your character: Hrodberaht, Hrodber, Hroberah, Rodbert (amazing, there’s only one of these according to the Armory), Berahthrod, Berahrod, Berarod.

All these variations are unique snowflakes according to the WoW Armory.

Family Name

Pretty much the same as above, except you’ll be using the name of a family member, such as your spouse, son or daughter, mom or dad, honored Great Aunt or Grandparent, etc.

You can do some weird stuff such as using the first initial from the names of everyone in your immediate family. For my family, with The Hubby, Son and Daughter, it would be Maka. Following are a few more examples of mishmashing family names.

• Maalkeaj
  The first two initals of our first names.
• Alkeajma
  Same as above, but mixing up the order.
• Eldaelim
  The first two initials of our middle names. I actually like this one a lot!
• Keriah
  The first three letters of a first name + last three letters of a middle name.

I hope the information provided in this post will help you in your quest for the perfect unique snowflake name for your next character!

Next week - Naming your character: The Generator

Related Posts

Mama Druid’s names
Naming your character: The Generator
Naming your character: an Addendum
Naming your character: Meanings or Keywords
Naming your character: Azeroth Languages