Welsh Name Generator

How the Welsh Name Generator works

Welsh name generator: choosing a name that fits

Welsh naming has a history that is written into its surnames. Until the sixteenth century most Welsh people had no surname at all. A man was his father's son, Dafydd ap Gruffudd, and a woman her father's daughter, Angharad ferch Hywel, and a full name could run back three or four generations, Llywelyn ap Madog ap Rhys. When English law required fixed surnames the ap was absorbed into the father's name, so ap Richard became Pritchard, ap Hywel became Powell, ap Rhys became Price, ab Owen became Bowen, ap Robert became Probert. Where it was not absorbed, the father's name simply became the surname with an English possessive s: Jones from John, Evans from Evan, Williams, Davies, Hughes. The result is that Wales has very few surnames, all of them first names, and a class list of twenty can have five Joneses.

The Modern option gives the names currently popular in Wales, which have swung strongly back towards Welsh-language first names since the 1990s: Ffion, Seren, Osian, Cai, Macsen, Efa. The Traditional option gives the older stock, both the literary names revived by the nineteenth-century Welsh revival, Rhiannon, Branwen, Gwenllian, Llywelyn, Cadwaladr, and the chapel names of the last century, Myfanwy, Glenys, Emyr, Gwilym. Both pair with the same list of real Welsh surnames. The Patronymic option drops the surname and builds a name the medieval way, with ap for a son and ferch for a daughter, sometimes running to two generations.

Welsh spelling is consistent once you know it. Ff is the English f, a single f is v, dd is the th in this, ll is the sound with no English equivalent, and w and y are vowels. Ffion is fee-on, Dafydd is dav-ith, Llywelyn is roughly hlu-well-in. The spellings here are the Welsh ones, not the anglicised Griffith and Lewellyn.

For names across the whole United Kingdom, the British page; for the Cornish and Breton cousins of Welsh, the Celtic page; and for medieval names from England, France and Germany to sit alongside a Welsh patronymic, the medieval page.

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