Fantasy and Science Fiction have something in common when it comes to names; they gotta sound unearthly. Something from another culture unknown to this Earth or any of its languages. But how to come up with them? There are numerous ways, and often the best is to just start slapping syllables together and see what sounds right. But, if you’re having trouble here’s one way I came up with to generate names and words that sound like they came from my own world of Maldene.

Take any English word of two, maybe three, syllables tops. then simply swap the first and last syllables and re-spell it more phonetically. An example is a street in my city, called Myrtle Ave.. While biking up Myrtle, doing my usual thing of messing around with things inside my head. I first swapped the first and last syllables, giving me “tlemyr”, which is actually pronounced more like “tl-mer”. But I thought that a “y” should sound long, so it then became pronounced more like “tl-meer”, though still spelled now as “tlmyr”. Cleaning it up a bit then gives us “T’lmyr”, which later became the name of one of my characters in Maldene XI (the number of Maldene novels is another story).

Doesn’t work too well with really long words like “psychiatrist”, and while I did try it with a couple of Spanish words they still ended up sounding like Spanish words. At any rate, there you have it. Another little naming technique to put in your bag of tricks.