When the John Smith of India meets the Jane Doe of China

April 18, 2018 2:06 PM

For work reasons I need to come up with a list of about 20-30 fake names. They need to be immediately visibly fake, and yet easily and clearly distinguished from one another. Names that would not instantly be associated to any real or fictional person but instead feel as generic as John Smith does in English.

Right now we’ve got some employee names, and some fictional or celebrity names that have just been cut down to the single initial for the last name (Harry P, Bart S, etc) and only one is female. We have another set that's Test User1, Test User2 and that's horribly confusing to keep track of.

I have to set up a new test database now and want to do better: the real celebrity and employee names are a personal data issue, it's actually annoying to do the demos and testing when the last names are either a single letter, or nearly identical to each other, more than half my colleagues are in India and our customer base is worldwide, and I really want to see some women in there too.

I figure I have last names covered, by using a themed list of words relevant to our subject matter rather than real human names. To go with them I want male and female coded first names from different cultures/languages (but still typeable with a standard US/UK keyboard).

Google has sent me to mostly baby naming sites which just aren't giving me what I want. They are trying to suggest special names, I want boring names, plus I'm not sure how much to trust the info I'm finding.

Can anyone recommend lists of common names for non-English-speaking groups?

Or just tell me: where are you from and what names are invisible to you because they are just so ordinary? What first names are in your primary school texts like Dick and Jane in English, (but won't get the same smirks that "Dick" does for us now)?

posted by buildmyworld to Society & Culture (21 answers total)

D&D Name Generator
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:09 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

With full understanding that this isn't what you asked for: try the Random Name Generator, which will allow you to choose from many name sets from around the world (I don't see one associated with India or one of its major languages, however).
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 2:10 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Many cultures in West Africa have days of the week naming traditions. So a girl born on a Saturday in an Ewe area of Togo would often be named “Ama” for example.

Catholic Saint’s Day names are also often given to a child born on that day.
posted by raccoon409 at 2:12 PM on April 18, 2018

Best answer: List of Placeholder Names By Language - do a Ctrl-F search for John Doe, that will give you some examples

This question has been asked on AskReddit a number of times, here is a link to a Google search to help you find those threads.
posted by sacrifix at 2:23 PM on April 18, 2018 [10 favorites]

There is also List of terms related to an average person
posted by poxandplague at 2:28 PM on April 18, 2018

Best answer: Wikipedia has the answer - list of most popular given names by country. You want to be sure to pick the ones based on census numbers, not just most popular baby names. For example, in the US the most common names from the census are James and Mary (which seem pretty generic to me as a middle aged American woman) while the most popular new baby names are Noah and Emma (which are familiar but not common to me, probably since I don't hang out with today's preschool crowd) At any rate, it will give you mix of names from specific countries around the globe.
posted by metahawk at 2:31 PM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

Check out Mockaroo. It’s a free service for generating dummy data. I’m a big fan.
posted by bleep at 2:31 PM on April 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

They also let you select names from other cultures.
posted by bleep at 2:33 PM on April 18, 2018

Try finding the list of fake names that were used for an entire town in the film Buckaroo Banzi. They were designed to fit - almost - your exact remit.
posted by Faintdreams at 3:11 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

You'll probably want to combine a few names to take in the various common naming schema that various cultures use: hyphenated last names, solo names (What if the magician Teller wants to use your product?), surname-first names, long hispanic names (Juan García y Reyes), names with noble inserts (Klaus von Bulow), names with odd characters (such as accented characters), names with unusual capitalization (Connor MacLeod).

And speaking as a person with a suffix on my name, you should see if you can support suffixes like John Doe Jr.
posted by Sunburnt at 3:17 PM on April 18, 2018

Fantasy Name Generator with an extensive 'real names' section based on real cultures. (Or just populate the database with dragon and half-orc names.)
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 4:10 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

You'll probably want to combine a few names to take in the various common naming schema that various cultures use:

I am hoping this is not necessary, but (as someone with a hyphenated, overly-long name) here's a link to the evergreen Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 4:20 PM on April 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

Ivan Ivanovich for Russian.
posted by k8t at 4:21 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

What about the "American" names from a Japanese baseball video game? Here's a second list.
posted by zadcat at 5:36 PM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

The Dutch equivalent of John Doe is Jan Jansen.
posted by neushoorn at 10:16 PM on April 18, 2018

Ali, Abu, Muhammad, Siti, Nur, Rama, Sita, Krishna, Devi - Malay & Indian names I see a lot.
posted by divabat at 1:38 AM on April 19, 2018

There are several Asian countries where one family name predominates. For example, Nguyen is extremely common in Vietnam.
posted by SemiSalt at 6:04 AM on April 19, 2018

try searching most common given / first names by the year of approx. birth for the demo you want?
posted by runt at 8:03 AM on April 19, 2018

I had a similar problem at work once but wanted to be able to generate random names on demand. I downloaded the social security name list and sorted it by how common the name is. I took the first thousand male first names, female first names, and last names (my use case required being able to specify male or female fake data). That gives you one million male names and one million female names and diversity in them that roughly matches the US population.

You won’t be able to to tell they’re obviously fake like John Doe if you do it this way however.
posted by unix at 9:13 AM on April 19, 2018

Obviously fake names in an Indian context might mean the name of a famous Bollywood character. Male possibilities: Raj Malhotra, Gabbar Singh, Anthony Gonsalvez. Female possibilities are slightly less identifiable because women rarely tend to be iconic characters at all and even when they do, they're more identifiable by first names than first-and-last. Keeping that in mind: Basanti, Shivani Shivaji Roy, Rosie.
posted by MiraK at 10:27 AM on April 19, 2018

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. I ended up starting from metahawk's link, de-duping the list, and asking colleagues in other countries to eliminate names that didn't "feel" right and add some of their own. Then I arbitrarily selected one per letter (and snuck in a geeky reference for the missing U). Last names are just the first letter of the first name, so that it's clearly not real personal data when we put screenshots into training material.

Ahmed, Benjamin, Chris, Dan, Elias, Farida, George, Hong, Irene, Juan, Kang, Li, Michael, Noemi, Olivia, Piotr, Qian, Rowan, Sofia, Tess, Usul, Val, Wei, Xian, Youssef, Zhen
posted by buildmyworld at 1:00 PM on May 9, 2018 [1 favorite]