Random Name

Random Name produces full names built from a list of common first names and surnames. They are the fastest way to fill a table, a contact list or a user directory with entries that look like real people rather than like placeholders such as User 1 and User 2.

Looking realistic is the whole point, and it has a practical consequence you should plan for. The two lists are short, so the number of possible combinations is in the hundreds, and a batch of a hundred names will almost certainly contain repeats. For a small fixture that is irrelevant; for anything that requires each record to be distinct, deduplicate the output before use.

The names are drawn from a common English-language set, so the results are culturally narrow rather than representative. That is fine for a neutral mock-up and not suitable when the point of the data is to reflect a real population, where the distribution of names is part of what is being tested.

There is nothing to configure and several things are therefore out of reach. A name is always a first name and a surname, so no middle initial, title, honorific or suffix can be added, and no format such as surname-first can be selected — a directory or mailing list that needs that shape has to be reformatted afterwards. The two parts are drawn independently, so the pairing ignores the real-world association between first name and surname and can produce combinations that would never occur together. Nothing beyond the name itself is produced — no username, email form, initials or identifier — and the tool gives no indication of how many of the names in a batch are repeats.