17 Computer-Generated Hipster Baby Names No One Else Has Yet

It’s easy to think of a name that no one else has. You can put together letters that seldom appear next to each other (Tmupb), repeat infrequent letters (Zxxxzzzik), or use an existing word that isn’t usually used as a name (Bottle). It’s much harder, though, to come up with a name that sounds like a name, has the look and feel of a name, but no one else has used yet.

Andrej Karpathy recently did a little experiment to see whether he could automatically generate “new, fun and plausible baby names” using a neural network trained on a list of 8,000 actual baby names. Most of the names it came up with were not anywhere in the training set, but still look like they could be names (as opposed to just possible words of any kind). In fact, many of them are names of someone, somewhere, which I discovered by Google searching (within quotes, to get exact matches) some of the ones that caught my eye.

There are people named Wynther, Jehn, Olyna, Bretna, Asthel, Jackein, Mickalen, Kathriel, Cleustina and pretty much any namey-looking combination of letters a human or computer can think of. But I found some that no one—or at least no one who has ever been mentioned on the internet—has yet claimed. Get them here now, before your cooler neighbor does.

1. Zilolene

2. Ulssand

3. Bartoede

4. Winolma

5. Kephsie

6. Cadbett

7. Wrissin

8. Gathalay

9. Tobborner

10. Meramele

11. Angavelle

12. Bernaxiea

13. Frennide

14. Therdence

15. Vylssius

16. Margusly

17. Borgannes (There are a few hundred of these, but they all seem to be misspellings of Borgarnes, a town in Iceland.)