#creature naming

[ghostopossumlives]

Wait. Why am I giving myself a headache trying to name this thing? I can just call it a lemur and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Behold:

This creature is a lemur now. It has a venomous genital and a cartilaginous pseudoskeleton.

[writing-with-olive]

Fantasy creature naming

As I’ve mentioned before on my blog, I spend a lot of time on 4thewords.com, and one of the nice things there is the forums. One of the creators posted this wonderful gem recently, and I thought I’d share. (Transcript below the cut)

You can check out CoffeeQuills at their website: https://coffeequills.com/

Should you decide to sign up for 4thewords (highly recommend), you can use this referral code: S2XSR15522  - using it means that should you decide to stay past the month-long free trial, I get a boost on my own subscription time, and I can also send you a “care package” which is basically loot :)

Anyway, here’s the tips:

A few notes for context: Ed and CofeeQuills are both devs of the site, and Riza is one of the locations you can unlock as you play through the game.

(below is the transcript)

Names are still hard for me in my own fiction, but it's a bit easier when creating the creatures & NPC names for 4thewords.

I only started naming creatures & NPCs around 2018, so many of the older names are from Ed. (Pester, Nitana, Rudakai, etc.) In a few cases, some creatures are named after pets ( Pester is named after Ed's dog, Pipit is named after Kellie's dog, and Maesc is named after my hedgehog, Mace).

I think I started fully naming things around Riza... (if I recall correctly)

There are a few different ways I use to come up with names:

1st - scientific names and words not much in use combined (low usage)

Heliography, the photographic process invented around 1822, fixing the action of light an image forms in a camera.

Dae, the end of scientific names for many families of butterflies (Hedylidae, Riodinidae, Pieridae, etc.)

Heliodae: that beautiful forked-lizard rainbow-winged creature in the Swamplands.

2nd - named after specific places, people, or things (mostly as a joke or homage)

Larida is a perfect example! I'm from Florida, so when I saw the chomping alligator, I offered up Lorida, but felt that was too obvious, so Ed and I agreed to change it to have an 'A' after the 'L'.

Belasi is another creature that's named as a homage to Bela Lugosi, the famous horror actor who played Dracula (I might have grown up watching those old horror flicks).

3rd - naming creatures to be within the same family (low to medium usage).

Ed started naming the Ardi Family: Ardis, Ardii, and Ardia - I just continued the tradition with Ardid. The Vi, Viyu, and Viyusa family was fun for me - the longer the amount of time needed to beat them, the longer the name became.

Some other creatures that are in the same family will use the same letters. Nezthai & Zanthei and Ascre & Sacer.

4th - looking up feature or creature name in many languages and smooshing that together (high usage)

Furoxi were a combination of Futago (Japanese word for twins) and the tetrodotoxin that causes pufferfish poisoning.