What inspires your doll's names?

I buy the sculpt and mess around with the faceup and clothes and poses until the character's personality starts to take shape. That's when their name will come to me.

My Mystic Kids Tremmel is named Cicero after a character from The Elder Scrolls series, and my Mystic Kids Qifeng is named Dhalsim after a character from the Street Fighter series.

 

Shoes.... The names of fancy heels inspires my mature female doll names..

 

they are named after my characters from stories I have or am writing

 

It's rather important to me what their names mean. My doll's names can tell you a lot about themselves. Other times, it just fits out of the blue and I run with it

 

Mostly... movie/anime/games. Yeah. I'm not that creative.

 

I'm pretty lazy with name everything so with the 2 I have.
My boys sculpt was JunHa so I went with Jay and my other I just kept with the original...
Maybe when I get more I'll put more thought into their names hahah xD

 

I have a couple that are named after anime characters and used a name website were you can get names to match meanings to find suitable names for many of them. Kaimana is Hawaiian for "ocean energy" so its the name of my sea sprite. Leon means "lion" and he's a cat or lion spirit. Two I came up with myself are Ephemera for my flower fairy, and Kit, short for Kitsune, a shape shifting fox from Japanese folklore. I took the idea of Soom's "the Fox" and made it my own.

 

Most of the names I come up with are characters that I admire or enjoyed from literature and film or names I've imagined for characters in my DnD campaigns. Although some of the dolls I have seen already have fine names attached to them that I might not change, for the most part it's the fantasy genre that provides name inspiration to me.

 

All of my names for my dolls are in my mind sometimes... Or I have to think about it a longer time.

But I try to name them all with a "Y" because my real name starts with a "Y" - weird I know - but for me there is more personality in the names of my dolls then. ^^

 

I usually use names I would prefer to have over my real name or names that I would like to use for my future children. It's kinda weird but it makes the doll more important to me. I also relate the names to the personalities/character traits of the character.

 

My first doll's name is her sculpt name, to which I added a second name and a surname. The other one was "born" because I had an idea from a mythological creature, and she got the name partly from that. My last one arrived at random, character and name. Their name even has a meaning in polish. :"

 

Most of my dolls names I came up with as a I think this will fit you. One of my dolls I use the company sculpt name for her but I have one doll that I couldn't name for a very long time. The dolls an elf so I started searching in different elven dictionaries for words that kind of describe how he looks, eventually I came upon a word and it just stuck as fitting for him. It took forever to name him though and I felt so bad because even the floating head I got some time after him got a name before he did.

 

My dolls choose their own names when they arrive, and when they're ready to tell me. Sometimes, they're a little traumatized from their journey to me.

 

Names are usually the last thing for me when it comes to character development. If I already have a character in mind, I'll generally have the name and everything finished before I find a doll that suits the character; often though, I'll see a doll I really like and then a character comes together in my mind, and once that character is mostly finished, I'll go name hunting. I never buy a doll without already having a finished character (because it's the character that's important to me, not just having the doll), so I don't have to worry about a doll sitting around without a name.

Naming is pretty hard for me, but I like names with relevant meanings to the character, and love names that can be shortened into cute nicknames. I also like names with cool relations to each other within families or sets of characters.

For example, my water deity, who will eventually be a Miracle Doll Jing, is named Shui, which is Chinese for water. Cumulo and Nimbus, Shui's sons, are named after clouds because clouds originate from water. Their nicknames are Cloudy and Stormy respectively; Stormy because he's a grumpy teenager, and Cloudy because it's cute. (I...maybe put too much thought into this stuff. )

 

All my OC dolls are based in a fantasy-style storyline, so names for them tend to come from me being creative rather than looking up names based on their meaning in name books or baby name websites. Some of their names came to mind on a whim and I just happened to like how it sounded (Zelle and Nira are examples of this), while others are inspired by my love of history, or from researching something of interest.

Take Tahmos' name: I had a certain aesthetic for his name in mind, but the actual name came to me while watching an Arthurian tale documentary on Netflix. One possibility for the origins of Arthur, someone named Tamos, was mentioned in it. I also discovered the same name (with the same spelling) in one of my Ancient Egyptian texts, and felt it was suiting. Aqqen, Tahmos' bf---his name came to me after writing a paper for my art history class about the Amarna period of the 18th dynasty of Ancient Egypt's new kingdom period (the one King Tut came from). I took a particular interest in the history of Tutankhamen's immediate family, especially Akhenaten, the pharaoh believed to be his father. I really grew attached to the Akhen part of the name, but wanted something more unique. Then I remembered the city of Saqqara in Egypt, and thus: Aqqen was created.

My MSD's name came from the Japanese tale of the girl wanting to cure her Leukemia through origami and a wish: Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.

Other names are sometimes inspired by favorite books, movies, TV and songs. I take inspiration from the things that I love

As for my existing character based dolls--the names are taken from the characters they're based on

 

For my two dolls that I currently have I picked the theme of flowers for their names, which worked out well. However, I also work as a file clerk at a place that has about two decades worth of files so if I see a really interesting or particularly nice name I usually make a note of it at the end of the day just in case it could come in handy later.

 

I like to look for unique names, but nothing too complicated.
I think my most complicated name is probably "Citlali". Which means Star in a native american language.
For that I just looked up meanings for star in different languages and that was the one that stuck out to me. Haha.
And I think it suits her very well! For the rest of em, I just kinda gave them names I liked.
Raiden, Maiza, Aislin, Viola~
Raiden, I think that was a name for a doll sculpt and I just really liked it!
So I gave it to my rocker-esk character suiting her well.
Maiza & Aislin. I was looking for whimsicals names, as they story was originally fantasy.
They stuck out to me the most, and are very fantasy like. Though I don't know if thats the direction of their story anymore.
Then Viola. I actually had named this doll something else at first.
Then I heard this name somewhere and it just kinda clicked! It was perfect for her!

 

I like to name my doll after my D&D characters

 

My off-topic dolls get names from a list I've generated of unique names I've encountered--mostly from reading and this page: Kate Monk.

My BJDs; however, can't seem to keep names from this list. I don't really know why, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that they aren't specific for the character.

"Pip" is from a TV show--I kind of feel uncomfortable saying which because the character who has this name has terrible things happen to her and my Pip isn't inspired by her at all. Her nickname is also probably due to the fact that I loved the Pippi Longstocking cartoon when I was younger, perhaps because I'm a ginger myself.

"Eurydice," who I'm calling Arial Underwood, has a name inspired by writing-related things. A typewriter and a typeface. I wanted the name to be strange enough that someone who read it might automatically assume it's made up. And it sort of is--by Arial herself. Her given name never suited her anyway. Her given name, Tom Lane, is taken from a Scottish poem about a faerie who has sex with a woman who eventually becomes pregnant and gets an abortion. I like the poem because today, it seems ahead of its time. Arial's story deals with fairies and body autonomy, so I liked the reference.

"Orpheus's" name (Mary Ann Washington) is supposed to be very boring. A John Smith sort of name, but dated (she's from the 1960s), and with religious undertones, which is a bit of a contrast from her focus on fact and empiricism. (She's kind of a pain to talk to.) It's supposed to make her seem very ordinary and practical, which contrasts with the person she becomes after taking the name "Anu." (A name itself which is sometimes considered one part of the threefold goddess Morrigan, from Irish mythology. I liked that the goddess is sometimes called "Gentle Annie," but she's terrifying, just like Anu--there's a sort of violent, self-destructive facet of the character that I think this name alludes to.)

"Kore's" name, Mneme Mori, is a play on memento mori (remember that you will die), which was an art movement from the Renaissance (the phrase and sentiment has earlier roots in ancient Rome) that regained popularity during the Victorian Era. It's also sort of a joke [or not]: if your name is the least bit strange, and you look foreign, it automatically becomes unpronounceable to everyone (even if it's phonetic)--so she decides to cut her losses and go with "Min."

"Hermes," or Holi'sse (Holinesse) Meriwether gets his name from the explorer, Meriwether Lewis (because Hermes is also a god of travelers) and Holinesse, a character in an Elizabethan play meant to represent the ideal of a pious and virtuous hero. I think this works for a character who is basically an angel. It's also ironic, I suppose, that he carries this name, but his personal life would probably be judged the exact opposite (he has an affair with someone who's married--a big no-no in his society).

I have other names written on my page, but they aren't set in stone yet, so I won't mention them.

 

My dolls are named as per their cultures. Chioma, for instance, has a West African origin name because her fantasy culture is somewhat based on some of the ancient history of West Africa.