Argonian Name Generator

Argonians, who call themselves Saxhleel, generally use two names drawn from different languages. The first is in Jel, the native Argonian tongue, and tends to be a single word or a short hyphenated form such as Haj-Ei. The second is Tamrielic — the hyphenated descriptive phrase most players recognise, like Hides-His-Eyes or Lifts-Her-Tail.

The two are often directly related. Haj-Ei and Hides-His-Eyes are the same person, because Haj means roughly hidden and Ei means eye. Not every Tamrielic name is a translation, though; some are simply adopted without reference to the original Jel name, usually because outsiders cannot pronounce it.

Argonian naming is bound up with the Hist, the sentient trees of Black Marsh. A native-born Argonian receives their name at a traditional naming day, Chukka-Sei, during which a young Saxhleel licks the Hist sap and receives their name. The name is obtained through the Hist itself rather than simply chosen by a parent, which is why Argonian names feel granted rather than inherited.

This is also why Argonians have no family names. There is no house or lineage encoded in an Argonian name — the Hist gives the name, and Argonians hold that all are equal beneath it. Only in the earliest games did Argonians carry surnames, and that convention was dropped.

Argonian names are not usually gendered, which is deliberate: Jel names give little away and neither do most Tamrielic ones. Where a name does include a pronoun it reveals the bearer, so Lifts-Her-Tail is female while Hides-His-Heart is male. Many names avoid pronouns entirely and stay ambiguous.

If you would rather write a Jel name than a Tamrielic one, the observed patterns help: Jel names avoid the letter combinations st and qu almost entirely, f appears vanishingly rarely, and the vowel pairs ee, ai, and ei turn up constantly. A name like Wuthilul sits comfortably in that sound-world.