Egyptian Name Generator

Set how many names you want (1 to 10), choose Boy, Girl or Random, and press the button to get Egyptian names with their meanings. The list has 122 entries: 70 boys' names, 50 girls' names and two unisex ones. It mixes names from ancient Egypt and its mythology (Khufu, Rameses, Nefertiti, Neith, Horus) with Coptic and Arabic names that Egyptians use today (Abanoub, Mahmoud, Salma, Nour), so what you get depends on which gender you pick and a little on luck.

Options and what each card shows

• Number of names: 1 to 10 per run. Names in a single run don't repeat.
• Gender: Random draws from all 122 entries; Boy draws from the 70 masculine names; Girl from the 50 feminine names. The two unisex entries (Moswen and Nane) only appear on Random.

Each result is a card with the name and a one-line meaning, for example Khepri: morning sun or Jabari: one who is brave. There is no surname or full-name mode; you get given names only, so pair one with the Random Last Name Generator if a character needs a family name.

What kinds of names are in the list

Roughly a third of the entries are ancient: gods and goddesses (Ra, Amon, Aten, Horus, Bast, Maat, Isis, Nephthys, Tauret), pharaohs and royals (Khufu, Rameses, Shabaka, Zosar, Nefertari, Nefertiti, Tiye, Kleopatra), and Greek-era spellings such as Ozymandias and Berenike. The rest are names Egyptians carry now: Coptic names like Abanoub, Arabic names like Abdelrahman, Karim, Omar, Mariam, Heba and Safiya, and Swahili-origin names that circulate across North and East Africa such as Jabari, Kamuzu and Rehema. The meanings are short glosses, not etymologies; several ancient names have disputed readings, and the list gives the most common one.

Sample names and meanings

Who uses it

• Writers and game masters naming a priest, a scribe or a pharaoh's daughter for a story set on the Nile, or a modern Cairo character who needs a plausible everyday name.
• Players naming a character in Assassin's Creed Origins, Pharaoh, Total War: Pharaoh or a tabletop campaign with an Egyptian flavor.
• Parents browsing Egyptian baby names with meanings, particularly the Arabic and Coptic ones still in use.
• Teachers handing out an "Egyptian name" to each student for an ancient history unit; run it with 10 names at a time and a class of 30 takes three presses.

How ancient Egyptian names worked

Egyptian names were usually short sentences. Many included the name of a god as a statement of devotion: Rameses (Ra-mes-su) means "born of Ra," Tutankhamun means "living image of Amun," and Meritamen means "beloved of Amun." Others described the child or a wish for them: Nefertiti, "the beautiful one has come." Pharaohs took a set of five royal names on accession, of which the throne name and the birth name were written inside cartouches; the names in this list are birth names, the ones people are familiar with. Because hieroglyphs record consonants but not vowels, modern spellings are reconstructions, which is why you will see Amon and Ammon, Rameses and Ramses, or Kleopatra and Cleopatra as separate entries. The "mummy names" people search for are simply the names of the individuals whose mummies were found: Ramses II, Seti I, Hatshepsut, Tiye.

Other name generators

For names from other cultures, the German Name Generator and Austrian Name Generator follow the same layout. If you want something gender-neutral from a broader pool, try the Unisex Name Generator; for a couple, the Couple Names Generator. The rest are listed under all name generators.