MAY 02, 2024

Worldbuilding, Naming, Computations

<aside> 📒 A naming aesthetic of blending two words into one: Naṁėṡs = names + mess

</aside>

Years ago, I wrote an article about naming which had this throwaway example:

My personal favorite are compound names: Hagrove, Treerie, Weapond – they sound fey to me. So ancient, that the language warps around the concepts they're conveying.

Let’s call those collapsible names. Two words, the end of the first is the same as the start of the second. Dream + amber = Dreamber. Or, with diacritics over the shared part: Dreȧṁber*.*

In this post, I revisit that idea and show some cool names I’ve minded with a script.

Aesthetic

So, what’s special about Hagrove, Treerie, and Weapond?

I got an idea from a fantasy map I saw on Pinterest, maybe a tutorial or a commission example – it had a forest named Hagrove. And I thought: oh, interesting, the ‘g’ is shared! It felt like was not a mere grove with some hags – but the hag grove. As if the two words were invented just to describe it. You might break the name apart and re-purpose its pieces to describe a troll grove or a hag mire – but you can see that those are derived terms, as they don’t fit as nicely together.

Similarly, I like the idea of prehistoric entities speaking in rhyme. Not intentionally – just due to the gravitas of their presence crumpling and plowing this “new thing”, the language.

Curated list of names

Two-letter collapsible names