Naming Patterns in Fantasy Races

30 June 2006 | PlayOn authors archive

We were interested in the names that people picked for their characters. Were there commonalities across the WoW races or did different races have their own naming conventions? So we parsed through all unique names in the January data in several ways – by first letter, by 3-letter prefix, and 3-letter suffix. Here are the top 10 lists for these different parses by race.

There were interesting findings throughout. The most common first letter of a name was “S”. 10% of all names in the sample began with an “S”. This was followed by “A” (7.6%) and “D” (6.7%). If anyone has access to the distribution of first letters of English names, please let us know how this matches to those.

Among the prefixes, it was interesting to see the prefix “Sha” appear in the top ten for all the races. It was also interesting to see racial differences. For example, we see references to “Moon”, “Night” and “Star” among the Night Elf names, whereas we find references to “Dead/Death”, “Mort” and “Malevolence” in the Undead names.

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: Month of January
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 179,003 characters

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