Roman Name Generator

A Roman citizen of the republic carried the tria nomina: a praenomen, a nomen and a cognomen — Marcus Tullius Cicero, in that order. The praenomen was the personal name, and Rome used astonishingly few of them; roughly a dozen were in general circulation, which is why so many of them are simply numbers (Quintus, "fifth", Sextus, "sixth", Decimus, "tenth"). In writing they were almost always abbreviated: M. for Marcus, C. for Gaius, Cn. for Gnaeus.

The nomen was the real identifier. It named the gens, the extended clan, and it always ends in -ius for men and -ia for women: Tullius, Cornelius, Julius, Aurelius. The cognomen started as a nickname attached to one branch of the gens and hardened into an inherited surname — which is why so many of them are unflattering physical descriptions. Cicero is "chickpea", Brutus is "dull", Rufus is "red-haired", Crispus is "curly", Scipio is "walking stick". A Roman family kept the joke for four hundred years.

Roman women usually took the feminine of the father's nomen and nothing else, so every daughter of the gens Julia was Julia. Sisters were distinguished by order or size rather than by a new name: Julia Maior and Julia Minor, or Cornelia Tertia. Naming a Roman woman with a full three-part masculine-style name is the most common mistake in fiction set in the period.

From roughly the third century AD the system collapsed into a single name again, and the names that survive into medieval and modern Europe are mostly late cognomina with Christian meanings — Felix, Justus, Clemens, Benedictus, Victor, Constantia. If you are naming a character, pick the era first: tria nomina for the republic and early empire, a single meaningful name after it.