Naming your dolls

I'm hoping for Irrealdoll Nora and will call her Eleonora because I was reading a book about her. She is the mother from Richard Lionheart. Aleonòr d'Aquitàniac.

 

I'm not great at naming them. They do have names but I will either forget them or give them something else randomly. When I think of my dolls, I usually just scroll through their faces.

 

I haven't really thought about names, they known by their date of arrival. Maybe one day I'll find time to give them a proper name.

 

For me, I decided to go with flower names, or names related to flowers, for my dolls. Don't really know why, but I did. The only one who isn't named after a flower is an OC of mine that is close to my heart.

 

For me all of my dolls have some kind of cultural name. I figure out their background then use name databases to look up interesting names and meanings behind them. I match the meanings to their personalities. I have Egyptian, Russian, French, Persian and Japanese characters. Some characters like my bioluminescent sea demon named Lumin is named after his traits.

 

A few of mine were bought to represent a character I already had, and thus was already named. Most though, seem to name themselves (in that a name comes to me after they arrive).

There are a couple though that have been awaiting their name for some time; I stare at them daily trying to learn who they are...

 

For my vinyl dolls, I name them after flowers. They also have a "regular" name, but the flower name is their "witch name" which is what they go by, as such I don't share the original names; it's considered rude to refer to a witch by her given name.
For my resin dolls... I just google Edwardian era names.. if none of those fit, I look up Victorian era names. So far I haven't had a case where neither era worked... Not sure what I'd do then, Georgian maybe?

 

Vince, Pete, and Billy were all named after other characters, but aren't really embodiments of those characters.

Marigold was a birthday gift, and so I named her after my birth month's flower, since she's an Autumn, and I thought her name should be autumnal but also nature related.

Jack is my D&D character, so his name was easy. Deanna shares a name with a friend-outside-my-D&D-group's roleplaying character, though original!Deanna and Jack come from very different universes, it felt like a suitable name for my lady ranger when I decided I wanted to build an adventuring party around doll!Jack.

Party Martian got his name from a line in Earth Girls Are Easy.

 

Maybe i over complicate everything, but before give a name to my character i do the a full research. All my dolls are characters from my story and each character's name has meaning. Several of them hide their real names for reasons known to them, but in general all names has a specific translation that can describe the character itself as a person or give some characteristic, if to pay attention to it.
Soyala - main male character. his name meaning Winter Solstice if translate it from Native American, yet he is basically chinese, like the rest of my crew (only Don is exception). there is a reason behind it.
Hanmei - main female char, name meaning is Winter Plum. she was born when the earliest winter plums starts blooming.
Masheng - not a real name, but refers to his true form, which is a red sparrow.
Donovan - not a real name, but he took it as a characteristic, because he has a brown hair
Kiyo - name means redemption, name given by her father Soyala, cause he believes she is his redemption for all the things he has done.
Wei - name can be written with different hieroglyphs, but his name reflects who he is the High Technomage, leader of all technomages, and his name is written as "power".

and this is only the name of the dolls that i have, but all characters from my story has name and well searched meaning behind it by analogy to the listed above

 

Usually I try out a bunch and just settle on what feels right. Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes it's only a day, sometimes I know before they even come home. Essie was supposed to be an adult version of a beloved childhood doll named "Esther"; I knew who she was going to be months in advance. Hyacinth was quick - I knew she should be a flower and I had a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses on my nightstand at the time, so I guess hyacinths were on my brain. I think it took maybe three days for her.

Sometimes they never have a real, proper name! Robin, my little elf girl, will probably always skip between Robin and some kind of Tolkein/Sindarin name (I got her while I was trying to read the Silmarillion and my head was in a million different places at once - not a great time to name anything!) and the only thing that stuck to my Atelier Momoni Somni was "Som".

Sometimes it takes weeks but then you get the right name and it's like they were never anything else! I have one doll where I tried half a dozen names. Then as I was browsing through my mental list, Opal came up and it just worked. I can't even remember what some of my "maybe" names were now.

I'm currently trying to settle on my Frappzilla Lupi's name and I think they're going to be Rigel. It seems like they should have a star name, and it's one of the more name-like ones I can think of.

 

I use Victorian naming conventions for mine, so lots of references to flowers/plants, Greek mythology, Biblical stories, and Egyptian mythology/history.

 

I name mine mostly from Japanese names ..I do have one my most recent one I named Xyla. When I come up with a name I always look the meaning of the name up and see if it will fit the doll right..I set back and imagine the doll in a forest or in a fantasy kingdom or something like that .

 

My crew have a consistent naming system. They're all angelic characters, and each represents a virtue (wisdom, peace, etc). So they have a given name that reflects their virtue, and a surname that's based off a mythical bird -- because birds in mythology are often associated with heaven and considered angelic messengers themselves. (And I'm obsessed with birds too.)

That above sounds all very tidy... but in reality it took me a while to settle on this naming system, because it took me a while to figure out what kind of characters my dolls would embody. I went through some trial-and-error with character development, even sold some dolls that didn't fit the world-building and/or I couldn't shell characters in them. But once I got the characters and world sorted out, it became really easy to figure out how to name my crew.

 

Everyone's name follows a plant or flower theming. It doesn't always work, so I keep it as an alternate name so it wouldn't technically be breaking the pattern. If the sculpt name suits the doll, I keep it. Even then, I would try to find a plant that is related to the sculpt name. Names can get strange since I mostly derive names from scientific names.

 

I never named them (( I should but actually they aren't even OCs, just dolls to play with and dress up, I don't feel like they have personality per se...

 

Haha well I'm in the process of revamping my dolls as it is, but since my dolls are also characters I basically go through the same sort of naming woes as any of my other characters. Generally speaking I use name sites, almost always Behind the Name, in order to help choose something. Sometimes it's based around the supposed ethnicity of the character, other times it's based around some sort of theme (like looking up 'flower' names or what not). In characters that are purely from worlds I've made up, I have a bit more fun with just smashing together letters to get names or using fantasy name generators.

 

My dolls are all characters from my novels and names are very important to me. Generally they'll have a name that reflects something about their character/personality/what they are. I'll often use a name site to try to find something that fits/suits. If nothing there works, I'll pick several things about them as a character and enter those words into an online thesaurus to see if any perks my interest. Then that word is looked up in a dictionary for the word origin, alternate spellings, root words, etc. Sometimes I draw a blank on those methods so I'll go back to the collection of descriptive words and start throwing letters together to see what I get that is both pleasing to the ear and eye. Sometimes they just tell me who they are. Sometimes I stumble over their name.

Ondraeden is the Elder God of fear & Nightmares. His name means fear.
Wai-Lan is the God of Pain & Sorrow. His name was created by me to sound like the word wailing with a bit of a twist.
Jaiseki's name was created with some of the letters of his parent's names (Moswen & Kijika).
Enjei's name is literally the sound of the letters N and G. He was a new doll and I didn't have a character for him so I was calling him New Guy until I figured him out and that got shortened to N.G. and when I happened to say that out loud one day I had my ahhh moment and realized that was his name.

 

I named one of my dolls for Demeter, and though I'm no longer a practicing pagan, Dimitri's name is going to remain as such. As for my other dolls, I just looked at baby name websites, lol. The only exceptions to this are Max, who was originally named after the Doll Family-A Max because he was going to have that sculpt as his head, and Fable, whose name sort of just sprouted from the aether fully-formed. I guess Demeter was like, "Thanks for Dimitri, here's a name for his girlfriend. She grew up in a farming community, btw."

 

Truth is... I make my partner name them. I do the faceup and body blushing myself and I usually ask his opinion on eyes/wig/outfit combo. He also comes up with a short blurb about their personality and based on all those things, names the doll. It motivates me to work on my blank dolls for that reason!

 

I collect names on a list, but I lost that list. I am making a new one on naming woes. Should I keep my list private? I notice people don't seem to share their name lists. Is it like personal thing that people don't like others having the same doll name thing?

Usually I get the names from stories, webtoons, kdramas, or names I randomly heard in passing. If I like the name I add it to my list.

https://denofangels.com/threads/naming-woes-help-and-resource-list.712079/