Drow Name Generator

What is a drow name actually made of?

Three layers, and only two of them are usually described. A drow carries a given name and a house name, which every competing page sets out correctly and which is worth keeping. The layer underneath is the one that gets missed: the given name is itself two published elements, each with its own meaning. Vierna is Vier, black or dark, plus na, adept or spirit. Malice is Mal, mystery or secret, plus ice, obsession or taken.

One ranking page states the opposite, twice. Read on 2026-09-17, it describes a drow given name as "chosen at birth by a matron mother or a temple priestess for how it sounds rather than what it means", and repeats the phrase in its own FAQ. The published tables gloss all two hundred elements, and another page on the same results page prints those glosses. The two are not both right, and the one with tables behind it is the one to follow.

The gender rule is a real mechanic and the source calls it significant. Most rows publish a female form and a male form of the same element, so Vier and Val are the same meaning in two mouths. A female name may borrow a male element and nobody comments. A male name that borrows a female element is taboo. The generator above follows that asymmetry rather than shuffling both pools together, and says when a borrowed element has been used.

Do the canon drow names decompose into these elements?

Nineteen of thirty canon drow given names decompose completely. Run through the reconciled tables, thirty names from the Forgotten Realms and Baldur's Gate 3 split into published elements as follows: 19 split cleanly, 1 splits partially, and 10 do not split at all. Drizzt is Driz plus zt, a steel hunter. Zaknafein, the weapon master, is Zakn plus afein, a shadow slayer. Minthara is Min plus thara, a lesser rune. Viconia is Vic plus onia, an abyss rod.

The ten failures are printed because a measurement that hides its misses is an assertion again. Quenthel, Shakti, Liriel, Yvonnel, Zeerith, Danifae, Nimor, Gromph, Jeggred and Sarith match nothing in either table. Jarlaxle gets as far as Jar, charmed or rune, and then stops.

This corrects the community source as well as the competing pages. The player who surfaced the tables wrote that "every single canonical drow character's name that I can think of can be translated from that list". Two commenters in his own thread doubted it, one of them over Araj and one over Nere, and the count says the doubters were right: a third of the test set does not decompose. The tables explain a majority of canon drow names, which is a strong result and a different claim from explaining all of them.

What does a drow house name mean, and where do the tables run out?

A drow house name is a relationship plus an allegiance. The house prefix says how the house stands to something, and the suffix names the something. Do'Urden is Do', walkers in, plus urden, the darkness. Hun'ett is Hun', the sisterhood of, plus ett, magic. Teken'duis is Teken', delvers in, plus duis, the whip. Read that way, a house name is a motto that has been welded shut.

The house tables explain fewer names than the given-name tables, and that is worth saying plainly. Of the 54 drow houses the Forgotten Realms wiki gives their own article, 12 decompose cleanly and 7 more miss by a single letter: Baenre is Baen plus something one letter from rae, fell powers; Zauvirr is Zau plus something one letter from viir, dominance. The remaining 35, Xorlarrin and Mizzrym and Vandree among them, match nothing. The tables are a good model of drow house names and not a complete one.

An apostrophe is the minority case, not the rule. One ranking generator describes its house names as built from a fragment "welded to a second fragment with an apostrophe", and every house it produces carries one. Counted across the same 54 canon houses, 17 carry an apostrophe, which is 31 percent. Baenre, Xorlarrin, Mizzrym, Duskryn, Melarn, Vandree and Auvryndar do not. Building every house name with an apostrophe reproduces a signature that two houses in three never had.

No canon house is ever generated here. All 54, plus the canon given names, sit on a blocklist the generator checks before it returns anything. That is not a theoretical concern: a dice table ranking for this query rolls Velkyn Baenre, Shriin Mizzrym and Faelynn Duskryn at players, which hands a new character a house that already rules Menzoberranzan.

Why does the drow shape table not make canon-shaped names?

The magazine's own shape table does not reproduce the magazine's own canon. Of the 19 canon drow names that decompose, 16 are the plain shape: one prefix, one suffix, at a median of six letters. Table 1 gives that shape on a roll of 1 to 3, so seven times in ten it produces a doubled suffix, an apostrophe split, or two full names, and the median name it rolls runs eleven letters. Roll the table honestly and you get something that does not look like Drizzt, Vierna or Dinin.

That is why the shape control above starts on the canon shape rather than on the d10 roll. The full roll is still there, labelled as the magazine's own distribution, because a generator that quietly ignores the source is a different kind of dishonest.

It also explains the complaint players make about these tables. In the thread that ranks first for drow names, one player assembled Dinrysn, a wild sorcerer, and said it "doesn't exactly roll off the tongue". The longer shapes stack three elements and push consonants together. The source anticipates this and tells the reader to insert a vowel or an apostrophe where a seam goes bad, and the generator here does that automatically rather than emitting four consonants in a row.

Where do the two copies of the drow tables disagree?

The tables survive in two independent transcriptions, and they differ in 31 of 200 cells. One is an Angelfire page that served as the community's reference for years. The other is a transcription made from the magazine scan and posted on 2023-06-01. Compared cell by cell, the prefix table disagrees in 19 rows and the suffix table in 12.

The Angelfire copy is gone. Checked on 2026-09-17, its hostname no longer resolves: a DNS lookup for the www subdomain returns NXDOMAIN and the page is unreachable. The version read for this page came from a web archive snapshot taken on 2023-12-10. A resource the community has pointed at for two decades is now one archived copy, which is a decent argument for publishing the reconciliation rather than leaving it in a link.

Most of the 31 are spelling slips and two are real conflicts about meaning. Gorrible for horrible, platiunum for platinum, reel for rebel and the stray space in Va l are typing, not disagreement. Prefix 34 and suffix 63 are different: the two copies give different meanings for the same element. In both cases the losing copy repeats a neighbouring row word for word, which is what a skipped line looks like when someone is transcribing a hundred rows by hand, so the other reading is used and the conflict is printed here anyway.

Row 49 of the prefix table is unreadable in both copies, appearing as LiNeer in one and LiNeeer in the other. Its female form is never generated. The male form, Mourn, meaning legend or mythical, is legible and is kept. Anyone holding the printed issue can settle all 31 cells, and this page is written so that would be a correction rather than an argument.

What do 60 built drow names look like, with their parts?

Sixty names built from the same tables the generator uses, thirty female and thirty male, each shown with its two elements and what they mean. Every row is the canon shape, one prefix plus one suffix, and no canon drow name or canon house appears anywhere in the list.

Read the two tables side by side and the gender pairing becomes visible. Balbreena and Belantar are the same two rows in female and male forms, which is why they mean the same thing. That pairing is the mechanic behind the taboo described above.

How do drow exiles and renegades name themselves?

The tables have a word for an exile, and it is a suffix. Row 75 gives tree and tel, meaning exile, loner, outcast or pariah, so a drow whose name ends that way is carrying their status in the name itself. That matters because the common case now is a player building a good-aligned drow: Drizzt keeps his house name and makes the contrast do the work, while a renegade who drops theirs is making a statement the tables can spell.

Players building Seldarine drow and clerics of Eilistraee reach for the song elements. In the thread that ranks first for this topic, one player chose a name for an Eilistraee cleric specifically because song and dance appeared in its meaning, which is row 3 of the prefix table, legendary or singing or song, with row 3 or row 27 of the suffix table, dance or minstrel. Use the meaning-first control on the Tool tab and that is a two-click build.

Where do these drow names come from?

The elements come from a set of drow name tables published in an issue of Dragon Magazine. They survive in two independent transcriptions, reconciled here: an Angelfire page whose host no longer resolves, read from a web archive snapshot of 2023-12-10, and a transcription posted on 2023-06-01 from the magazine scan. The house tables come from the same article, tables 4 and 5.

The issue number is not established, and none is invented here. The only number anyone offers is 251, and it is offered from memory, hedged, and for the ELVEN tables rather than the drow ones. No source read for this page names the issue that carried the drow tables. If you own the run, that is a correction worth sending.

These tables are a naming system with meanings, not a worked-out language. That caveat comes from a player in the same thread, who points out that Dragon's various name and lexicon articles covered draconic, elven and dwarven and "contradict each other", and were largely written for those articles rather than revealing a hidden grammar. Treat a drow name's meaning as a published gloss, which is what it is, rather than as a translation from a language with rules.

One more thing worth naming, because it appears twice in the ranking set: Angelfire is not a drow naming style. Two pages competing for this query carry a heading reading "Angelfire drow names", one of them followed by a sentence explaining that such names "evoke a sense of arcane mystery". Angelfire was a free web host in the 1990s, and the drow page it carried holds no list of names at all: it is the five tables and nothing else. A third heading on the same page reads "Drow names Reddit". Those are places the names were found, turned into categories by a keyword tool.

According to the Forgotten Realms wiki's list of drow houses, read on 2026-09-17, fifty-four drow houses carry an article of their own, and those fifty-four supplied both house measurements on this page. Every canon character name and every canon house on that list is blocked from this generator's output. Names are assembled in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing is logged. Dungeons and Dragons, Forgotten Realms and the drow are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast; this is an unofficial fan tool and names generated here are yours to use under their fan content policy.

Which drow name generator should you use?

Use this one when the meaning matters and the parent when the character does. For a whole D&D character across twenty-one races, the D&D name generator carries the Player's Handbook lists, drow houses included, and hands you a finished name faster. This page is the one that builds a drow name out of glossed elements and reads a canon name backwards, which the parent's word lists cannot do. For the version of this question that spans four franchises rather than one, the wood elf name generator separates D&D, Elder Scrolls, Warhammer and Tolkien.

What other name generators pair with the drow one?

For a class-led rather than race-led build, the D&D druid name generator works the same way this page does, from a published convention rather than a vibe. For Menzoberranzan itself and the other places these houses fight over, the city name generator decomposes place names the way this page decomposes drow names.