The Importance of Naming

I've been thinking about giving my doll a new name since somebody I know pretty much took it and removed one letter from it... D: (For her new doll, that is...) But I'm not sure. I'd feel weird giving him a new name.

 

Any doll I get from here on out will probably be named after my RP characters! ^_^

 

My first doll got her name, Esther after I saw everyone naming their dolls O_o

 

The names of each of my dolls have come to me within a few days of receiving them i find this the best way of doing it, i'm the same with pets, their names just seem to pop into my head as i get to know them those first few days!

 

I just got my first doll and was planning on naming her Asyris, (love the name, I made it up & never heard it anywhere else, ever!) but after making my username here that, I'm not sure if it's what I want to do or not. Big dilemma!

I'm thinking after I get a couple other wigs and try them out, it'll either stick or a new name will jump out at me

 

i suck at names, and i change every month....if i ever can even come up with a name in the first place, naming is something very hard for me

 

I don't think of names before I get the doll, but start thinking when the doll is ordered/bought. Then after I've spent some time with the doll, I settle on a name from my list that suits the doll's 'personality'. Then the back-story comes rolling in. xD

 

For the most part, I name my dolls according to the character they will be. Since my dolls are all intended to be characters from my writing, I basically choose sculpts with the characters in mind...

This has backfired in one instance, though. My BlueBloodDoll Valentine was on layaway when I ordered Andruthen, my AoD Jimi, and with nothing else in mind I decided that Valentine would be Andruthen's partner, Lorani. But since getting him home (and finding a more appropriate head for Lorani's character), he doesn't suit the character at all. So now I have to decide whether he suits another character from my story, or whether to give him a more "modern" persona...

 

I named my first doll easily, Ophelia, but my newest one I can not think of a fitting name for the life of me. I only have a month until I get her so I need to brain storm.

 

as weird as it sounds, it sorts of has to click for me. It's one of those things that once I know what to name her, i'd name her.

 

I name all of the characters my dolls are based on by finding names that have a meaning that fits either their story or their personality. For example my first guy (I can hardly call him a boy, he has kids and whatnot) is named Cato which means "wise" and fits his geekiness as well as the fact that he cracked the time code. His son is named Sam (short for Samwise because his daddy is a LoTR geek, plus it means half wise which I think is funny).

And sometimes I use names to create a link between characters, like Carmen and her GF Chantelle, both of their names mean song which relates to their backstory(s).

I go a little bit nuts with names really, it can take weeks of research and plotting to pick one.

 

[FONT=My Scars, serif]BaothgahalachAodhagán Vercingetorix aka Bao is my fist doll she is named after an Rpg Gnome i play who was named using some of my favored boy names on my future kids names list. So i like to name em like there my children lol. and don't really care if my future kids may have the same name[/FONT]

 

I'm poor at naming dolls, sometimes I've got fine names given to them but later it sounds awkward so i adopt their names from the official website

 

I have names chosen for my brothers I'm saving up for...but they might not be their actual names. I always find it helps once you see them and have them dressed for a personality spark. It goes for anything really! Dolls, pets, people lol

 

I too am a name freak. I delve into baby name sites, dictionaries, and wikipedia. Often I chose names that mean certain things like personality traits, but I don't wasn't it to be too obvious so I usually translate them into a language that sounds similar to the character's personality (like an Arabic name for someone who lives in the desert.
For my first two dolls I looked up the meanings of their names. Turns out they were exactly the right fit for the characters they were to become!
Once I decide on a name, I can't imagine them being called anything else; all other names just sound weird.
I don't think I could ever name a doll after someone/something in real life (or the other way around) as I'd find myself cross-projecting their personalities. I'd only name a doll character after someone in real life if I wanted to make that person /into/ a doll (like a Nav'i doll mod I saw on DA the other day, our a YouTube video where someone modded various doll parts into the guy who played Nightcrawler in the X-Men live action movies)

 

Honestly for me names come with the storyline. Vala's story as soon as I came up with a decent name for her (Vala means Chosen so it fits her being a chosen one to receive powers over the elements) the other characters names followed. Some I made up and some I chose because it fit with the doll molds chosen for said characters.

 

I had a very hard time naming my first doll, as I suddenly received her as a lotto prize in a doll fair. Took me like half a day to choose a name, and one more night to settle with an additional surname.

My second doll (which was originally supposed to be my real FIRST doll) didn't have that problem, as I am making her to represent my character from FFXIV. So she has the shortened name of my char, plus the surname of a character of my guy (crush).

 

I sometimes write stories in my free time so coming up with names & characters comes fairly easy to me! In fact, even before I'd finished the lay-away on my boy, I'd thought of probably half a dozen names for him! I had gone from the plain, traditional names to the mythological, otherworldly monikers for him. One of my favourites was a fantastic mythical character called Lykaon, an illegitimate son of the Greek God Apollo. I didn't know how I was going to pull off the fact that he was a half-human-half-wolf demi-god within his appearance, as Ringdoll's Sol has a very mellowed look of melancholy as opposed to the expression of a snarling wolf. So, that quickly got dropped.

When he did eventually arrive, the name he was initially given was Alexander Durand. Alexander because of the historical figure of Alexander the Great, and Durand because it seemed like a good surname. That changed to Alexander Petrakis, to give him more of a Greek back-story to somewhat justify that connection to Alexander the Great. Then, he went through a bit of a character reconfiguration last month and became Alexandre Laverdiere, a Frenchman. I had grown fond of calling him Alex, so I had to find a French name that I could shorten to Alex. And Laverdiere just rolls off the tongue and seems to fit perfectly after his first name!

My characters have to have surnames, if applicable. Lykaon didn't have a surname, because often mythological beings such as Apollo & Heracles weren't given surnames. Alex, being a normal human, had to have a surname in my opinion. I feel it helps to separate him from others who share his first name. Every character that I've come up, aside from the Ancient Greek personae, have been given surnames. Even if I have no intention of ever using them in the story the character comes from!

 

My shushu is going to be Charlotte. it reminds me of an exuberant socialite in NYC, where my character is from so that's how I came up with it.

 

Oh, my. Naming. I'm a name person. I name everything. I name every pet, every stuffed animal, every car, and even every computer. Most things, with any distinguishing characteristics, within my range get named. As such, my Liam had to have a name straight away. His name was picked off a short-list of names that I like, because it seemed to fit his face. It was just as simple as that. Since then, it's grown on him and I can't even consider calling him anything else.

As far as future dolls, I have a sister in mind for Liam. I'm kicking around alliterative names and names with related meanings, pulling from various lists and sources. For family members, I think that some sort of connection between names would be nice. But, as with Liam, I'll probably just generate a short list and then pick one name when I see the doll's face.

I think that for other, as of yet unplanned, dolls, I'll just pull from all of the names that I like. Since that's very, very, very diverse, my dolls will have really wide-ranging names. I think, most assuredly, that I would use names that I would call a child (mostly because I'm not planning on having kids). I see no reason why my dolls shouldn't have names that aren't on my favorites lists. That being said, I don't think that I'll reuse names; dolls won't get duplicate names, pet names won't be given to dolls, and no names of living family members or friends that I highly value. I don't like to cross wires in my brain and I think that duplicate names would just about do it for me.