Celtic Name Generator

Celtic is a family, not a single culture, and its naming splits into two branches. The Goidelic branch covers Irish and Scottish Gaelic, giving names like Aoife, Ciaran, Niamh, and Alasdair. The Brythonic branch covers Welsh, giving Rhiannon, Owain, Bronwen, and Gwyneth. The two share an underlying character — soft consonants, flowing vowels — but the spellings and sounds are genuinely distinct, and mixing them carelessly is the most common mistake in fantasy naming.

This generator draws from both, along with Scottish Gaelic, using real attested names. The otherworldly quality that makes these names so popular in fantasy is not invented: it comes from orthographies that map sound to letter very differently from English.

Irish and Welsh spelling conventions are consistent within their own languages but bewildering to English readers, which is why names like Saoirse, Caoimhe, Tadhg, and Ffion look so much stranger than they sound. In Welsh, doubled letters like ff and ll represent single distinct sounds, and w can function as a vowel — which is how a name like Bronwen works.

For fiction this is worth a moment's thought. An authentic Celtic name adds real texture, but if readers will encounter it only on the page, choosing one whose pronunciation is guessable saves them stumbling over your protagonist's name for three hundred pages.

Celtic surnames encode ancestry directly. The Irish O' prefix means descendant of, while Mac (in both Irish and Scottish Gaelic) means son of — so O'Brien and MacCarthy are literally genealogical statements. Welsh used ap, meaning son of, which over time contracted into surnames: ap Rhys became Price, ap Owain became Bowen.

Using these correctly adds real authenticity. If you want a name to feel Irish, an O' or Mac surname does more work than any amount of spelling; if you want Welsh, reach for ap or the patronymic-derived surnames it produced.