Irish Name Generator

How the Irish Name Generator works

How the Irish name generator works

Irish names have two lives. In English they are the familiar Kelly, Murphy and O'Sullivan, with first names that have kept their Gaelic spelling, Niamh, Saoirse, Tadhg, even when the surname was anglicised centuries ago. In Irish the same names are Ó Ceallaigh, Ó Murchú and Ó Súilleabháin, and the surname changes with the bearer's gender. A man is Ó, grandson of, or Mac, son of. A woman is Ní, daughter of, for an Ó surname and Nic for a Mac surname,. That rule is the single thing most generators get wrong, and this page applies it.

The Anglicised option gives names as they appear in Ireland today: a Gaelic first name in standard modern spelling, and an English-spelled surname with or without the O' or Mc. Fitzgerald and Burke are here too, because the Norman families who arrived in the twelfth century became, in the old phrase, more Irish than the Irish, and their names are as Irish now as any Ó. The Gaelic option builds a full Irish-language name with the fadas and the prefixes in place, which is what a character in an Irish-language story, a Gaeltacht family or a historical setting would use. Any mixes the two, which is roughly what a modern Irish class list looks like.

The first names are the ones actually given in Ireland, from the perennial Aoife, Conor and Ciara to the revived old names, Fiadh, Sadhbh, Odhrán, Caoilfhinn, that have climbed the registers since 2010. All of them are pronounced quite differently from how an English reader would guess, which is half their charm and the whole reason the Gaelic spelling has survived.

For the Ulster mix of Irish and planter names, the British page's Northern Ireland option; for Scottish Gaelic names, the Scottish page; and for a wider set of Celtic names across Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, the Celtic page.

Related tools