Eldritch Names: Horror Names and Eldritch Mage Names

Short answer

• Eldritch names are names built to sound strange, old and slightly wrong, as though they belong to something that does not quite fit the human world. This guide gives original eldritch horror names for entities, the vast, unknowable beings of cosmic horror, and original eldritch mage names for the human scholars, seers and spellcasters who study them. Every name below is an invention made for this list, in the style of cosmic horror rather than copied from it, and each one comes with a suggested pronunciation and a note on how its sound is built and what kind of character it suits. The working rule is simple. One strange element per name is unsettling. Three is noise. A good eldritch name can still be said aloud on the first or second try, because a name nobody can pronounce will be shortened at the game table or skipped by a reader, and the shortened version loses the effect.

What Eldritch Means, and Where the Style Comes From

Merriam-Webster defines eldritch as strange or unnatural, especially in a way that inspires fear: weird, eerie. The dictionary notes that the word originates in the 16th century and may come from a Middle English word, elfriche, meaning fairyland or the kingdom of elves, and that it can be found in the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. That double history explains the flavor of the word. It is an old word with a fairy tale root that horror writers bent toward dread.

The modern eldritch style comes mainly from cosmic horror, the kind of horror most closely associated with Lovecraft (1890 to 1937), the American writer whose stories appeared in the magazine Weird Tales from 1923 onward. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes his Cthulhu Mythos tales as stories of ordinary New Englanders encountering horrific beings of extraterrestrial origin, inside an elaborate original mythology, and notes that his fame grew after his death. Cosmic horror is not mainly about gore or shocks. Its fear comes from scale and indifference: beings so old, vast and alien that human beings barely register to them, and knowledge that harms the person who learns it.

Eldritch naming borrows its sound from that tradition, and it is worth borrowing honestly. The famous names in it belong to published fiction. The names here are new inventions using the same sound tools, clustered consonants, long vowels, broken syllables and trailing endings, without copying any published character. For background reading in the genre, see our reading guide to horror series for beginners.

How Eldritch Names Sound

An eldritch name is a small piece of sound design. Readers and players feel it before they think about it, and it is built from a few repeatable parts.

Hard clusters at the start

Ordinary English names tend to open with single, familiar sounds. Eldritch names often open with a cluster the mouth has to work at: Th, Kh, V or Z, as in Thal’gor, Kharzid and Yth’kaar below. The cluster signals that the name did not grow up in the reader’s language. Use one cluster and let the rest of the name be speakable.

Long vowels and endings that do not resolve

Names such as Vex’mara, Ilvaan and Vulmora stretch a vowel in the middle and then end on an open sound, ah, oh, ar, that trails off instead of closing cleanly the way Jack or Margaret close. An unresolved ending leaves a sense of unfinished business, which is exactly the feeling cosmic horror trades in. Endings built on oth, ul and eth do the opposite job: they cut the name off short and blunt, suiting things ancient, buried or indifferent.

The apostrophe, used sparingly

The apostrophe in names like Nul’oth and Thal’gor marks a break where a human tongue expects a smooth join. It suggests a sound English spelling cannot quite hold: a click, a pause or a missing syllable. One apostrophe in a name is a signal. One in every name is decoration, and it makes a list harder to read aloud.

Two names, two registers

Entity names and mage names use the same toolkit at different volumes, as the section on the difference below explains. In brief: entity names are usually one strange word, sometimes with an epithet such as the Hollow, because the being has no family or surname. Mage names keep a human shape, given name plus surname, with the strangeness turned down to one element.

Eldritch is not the same sound as elf, fairy or wizard

Neighboring fantasy styles solve naming differently, and mixing them by accident weakens all of them. Elf names favor flowing liquid sounds and aim at beauty rather than dread, as our companion list of 350 elf names shows. Fairy names lean on nature pictures and lightness. Classic wizard names lean on age and dignity. Eldritch names borrow a little of that age, then deliberately break the beauty: a hard cluster here, a blunt ending there. Given the possible elf root of eldritch itself, the styles are distant cousins, but they should not sound like siblings.

Eldritch Horror Names: Entities and Beings

These names are for the beings themselves: gods that are not gods, things under the sea or the city, watchers, dream speakers and presences that wear a human shape badly. Each entry gives a suggested pronunciation in plain English spelling, the role the name suits, and the sound trick it uses. All of them are original inventions for this list.

• Thal’gor the Hollow. Say TAL-gor. A being that wears a human shape badly and is empty inside it. Retained from the source list. The hard Th opening and the apostrophe break do the work, and the plain English epithet, the Hollow, tells the reader what to fear.
• Vex’mara. Say vex-MAH-rah. A whispering entity that speaks through dreams. Retained from the source list. The sharp Vex closes quickly, then the name opens into a long, trailing mara, which is the sound of something that will not stop talking.
• Nul’oth. Say NUL-oth. A short, blunt name for a thing found in deep water. Retained from the source list. Two chopped syllables and the oth ending give it the weight of a stone dropped in a well.
• Kharzid Une. Say KAR-zid OON. An ancient watcher below a city. Retained from the source list. The Kh cluster and the hard z make the first word difficult in the mouth, and the single long vowel of Une sounds like a note held too long.
• Morghul Veil. Say MOR-gul. A horror that appears as fog and is named for the shape people think they see in it. Retained from the source list. The gh in the middle thickens the sound, and pairing it with an ordinary English word, Veil, makes the strange half stranger by contrast.
• Yth’kaar. Say ith-KAR. A star born entity that does not understand humans and has never needed to. Retained from the source list. It opens on a vowel and a th with no warm up, and the doubled a stretches the final syllable like light taking too long to arrive.
• Ossivane. Say OSS-ih-vayn. A presence that lives in walls, floors and the spaces inside houses, heard as settling and knocking. The double s hisses, and the vane ending gives it the feel of something turning slowly toward a sound.
• Vulmora. Say vul-MOR-ah. A deep sea entity, less a creature than a pressure and a patience. The vul opening is heavy and closed, then the name rolls out into open vowels, the sound of something very large moving below you.
• Thren’ul. Say THREN-ul. An entity perceived as a choir, many voices producing one note that human listeners hear as singing from underground or underwater. The thr cluster is hard to say softly, which suits a name people in the story avoid saying at all.
• Sekhvar, the Cold Witness. Say SEK-var. A star entity that only watches and records, and whose attention is itself the disaster. The kh in the middle is the one strange element, and the flat, factual epithet makes it colder than any threat would.
• Ondrask. Say ON-drask. A drowned thing tied to one wreck, one harbor or one stretch of coast, known to sailors by a name they pass on without explaining. The dr cluster and the sk ending make it sound scraped, like a hull on rock.
• Bel’othra. Say bel-OTH-rah. A dreaming entity under a desert or a dry lake bed, worshipped by a small cult that insists she is sleeping rather than dead. The soft Bel opening lulls, then the oth break reminds the reader what kind of list this is.
• Ilvaan. Say il-VAHN. An entity tied to a single standing stone, painting or statue that appears in records across centuries, unchanged. Only one syllable is stretched, and the restraint makes it feel documented rather than invented.
• Ashkavan. Say ash-kah-VAHN. A fog and ash presence that follows fires and burned places. The ash opening is plain English and the rest is not: a half familiar name for a thing met in the worst week of people’s lives.
• Qirath, the Unanswering. Say KEER-ath. A being that people pray to, consult or interrogate, which responds, but never to the question that was asked. The Q without a u is a small visual wrongness, and the epithet states the horror plainly.
• Ulmira, the Dream Debt. Say ul-MEER-ah. An entity that lends sleepers vivid, useful dreams and collects payment later, in dreams they would not have chosen. The sound is almost pretty, which is the point: not every eldritch name should snarl.

Eldritch Mage Names

Mage names follow a stricter rule, because a mage is a person. Readers and players have to remember the name, say it in conversation and tell two mages apart. So each name below keeps a human shape, given name and surname, and carries its strangeness in one place only. All of the full combinations are original to this list. One honesty caution: a familiar looking first name may be a real, older name used in a new combination. Selene, for example, is the personification of the moon as a goddess in Greek and Roman religion, per Encyclopaedia Britannica. A real first name inside an invented full name does not make the character historical.

Scholar mages

These mages found the entity through books, archives and other people’s mistakes. Their names sound like old stone and older paper.

• Selene Vex’mar. Say seh-LEE-nee VEX-mar. A mage who studies forbidden stars. Retained from the source list. The classical first name does the dignity, the broken surname does the dread, and the combination hints at the cost of her subject.
• Orthus Grimwald. Say OR-thus GRIM-wald. A scholarly mage whose name sounds like old stone. Retained from the source list. Two heavy, Germanic feeling halves with no soft sounds anywhere, for a man who treats horror as an archive problem.
• Mordaine Quill. Say mor-DANE KWIL. A bookish mage who writes down what should not be written. Retained from the source list. The surname is the joke and the warning at once: a quill is a harmless tool until you ask what it has been recording.
• Emeric Voss. Say EM-er-ik VOSS. An antiquarian mage who buys the libraries of the dead. The given name is almost ordinary and the surname is one blunt syllable, the naming equivalent of a man who is polite in person and alarming on paper.
• Halden Marrow. Say HAL-den MAH-roh. A mage who studies anatomy texts that no medical school will shelve. Marrow is a real word for what is inside bone, and putting a body word in the surname does the eldritch work without any invented syllables.
• Petran Ulm. Say PET-ran ULM. A mapmaker mage charting places that appear on no two maps the same way. Both halves are short and clipped, a name that sounds redacted, as though a longer name was cut down for the record.

Seers and dream speakers

These mages receive rather than study. Their names are softer at the front and wrong at the back.

• Thalia Nul. Say THAH-lee-ah NUL. A young mage touched by a deep entity. Retained from the source list. A long, musical given name cut off by a one syllable surname that means, in effect, nothing: short name, long shadow.
• Ilyra Thal. Say ih-LEER-ah THAL. A seer mage whose name trails off like an unfinished sentence. Retained from the source list. The given name is all vowels and drift, and the surname is the first half of an entity name from the list above, which quietly ties her to what she sees.
• Ysolt Vane. Say ih-ZOLT VAYN. A mage who reads weather and omens for a coastal town that pretends not to consult her. The z is the one strange element, and Vane, like a weather vane, points at her trade.
• Maera Holt. Say MAIR-ah HOLT. A dream speaker who charges nothing and is therefore feared more than the mages who charge a great deal. Both halves sound almost plain, and the wrongness is only in how the town says her name, quietly.
• Wrenna Dal. Say REN-ah DAL. A young seer whose given name begins with a bird and whose surname is a single cut off syllable, for a character whose visions arrive in fragments and never in order.

Mages marked by what they studied

These names carry a visible cost: ash, graves, ruins and ruin.

• Corvin Ashen. Say KOR-vin ASH-en. A mage of ash and ruin, whose magic leaves marks on rooms and on him. Retained from the source list. The hard Corvin opening softens into Ashen, a surname that is really a condition.
• Ambrose Kett. Say AM-brohz KET. A mage who survived his own summoning and now teaches younger mages exactly where he went wrong. The warm, old fashioned given name against the clipped surname gives you a man held together by routine.
• Tomasin Grau. Say TOM-ah-sin GROW. A mage and former engraver who copies inscriptions from sites she will not name. Grau is a gray, muted sound, and the whole name feels dust covered, which suits a character who brings the past home on her hands.
• Liora Fen. Say lee-OR-ah FEN. A mage of marshes and drowned roads, useful to everyone and trusted by no one. The given name is bright and open, the surname is a flat wet place, and the contrast is the character in miniature.
• Odric Fenholm. Say OD-rik FEN-holm. A retired mage who keeps the lighthouse, the records and, though he denies it, the watch. A settled name with a door that closes, for a man whose story is about staying put.

Entity Names and Mage Names: the Difference

An entity name answers the question: what do frightened people call the thing they cannot describe? It is usually a single word, because the being has no family name to inherit. It often carries an epithet instead of a surname, the Hollow, the Unanswering, the Cold Witness, because human beings name what a thing does when they cannot name what it is. Entity names can afford to be harder to pronounce, because they are spoken rarely, on important occasions, and a slight stumble can even help the scene.

A mage name answers a different question: what does this person’s name look like on a letter, a door or a charge sheet? Mages were born to families and have to be introduced at dinner, so the strangeness is rationed. One element carries the eldritch charge and the other keeps the name usable. Selene Vex’mar puts the charge in the surname. Thalia Nul puts it in the collision between a long, lovely given name and a surname that stops dead.

Titles differ too. An entity gets an epithet because it has no biography. A mage gets a role: the mapmaker, the lighthouse keeper, the woman the town consults and pretends not to. If a mage’s name needs an epithet like the Hollow to feel frightening, the name is probably too plain, or the character’s reputation needs building first.

Names for Cults, Tomes and Places

Eldritch settings need more than characters. The same sound rules name the groups who serve the entities, the books that describe them and the places where they are met. All of the following are inventions for this list, offered as patterns as much as names.

Cults sound best when they sound respectable from the outside. The Congregation of the Last Tide could meet in any harbor town hall. The Keepers of the Ninth Bell sound like a bell ringing society until a reader asks what the ninth bell is for. The Hollow Choir drops the respectability for a group shown openly. The Society of the Unlit Star suits a wealthy, educated cult that funds expeditions.

Forbidden books need titles that sound catalogued rather than theatrical. The Vulmora Codex ties a book to the deep sea entity above. The Ledger of Une suggests accounts and debts rather than spells. A Grammar of the Deep is the most unsettling, because a grammar implies the thing can be learned, correctly, by a careful student. The Thren Manuscripts suits a bundle of copied pages: dangerous texts often survive in fragments.

Places take the plainest names of all. A village with an ordinary name, a mill, a church and one street nobody uses after dark will feel real, and the eldritch name can be saved for the thing under it. Reserve the strange syllables for what earns them.

Building Your Own Eldritch Name

You can build a name in this style in five steps, using the lists above as spare parts.

First, choose the register. Entity, mage, cult, book or place. The register decides how much strangeness the name can carry. Second, pick one strange element: a hard opening cluster such as Th, Kh or V, a stretched vowel, a blunt ending in oth, ul or eth, or a single apostrophe break. Third, add a plain element to hold it. For a mage, that is an ordinary given name or a real English surname word like Marrow, Ashen or Holt. For an entity, that is a plain English epithet like the Hollow.

Fourth, say the name aloud in a full sentence, three times: a summons, an introduction and a warning. If you stumble in the same place twice, the name is too hard for a mage and should lose a cluster. An entity name may keep one stumble, no more. Fifth, search the name before you commit to it in anything public. Invented names collide with other writers’ inventions, games and bands more often than anyone expects, and a quick check is cheaper than renaming a character in chapter nine. Our guide to how to write a novel applies the same test across a whole manuscript.

Useful spare parts: openings Thal, Vex, Nul, Mor, Khar, Oss, Vul and Il; endings oth, ul, eth, aar, mara, vane and une; mage surname words Ashen, Marrow, Holt, Grau, Fen and Quill. Combine one opening, one ending and, where the register allows, one plain word. Thal plus une gives Thalune, a softer entity or a place. Vex plus Holt gives Vexholt, a mage surname with the charge turned down.

Using Eldritch Names in Games and Fiction

In a tabletop game, give players a name they can attempt, and accept the pronunciation they settle on, because the table’s version becomes the real one within two sessions. Put the hardest names on entities the party hears about long before they meet, so the name gathers dread by repetition. Keep a short form ready: a cultist who calls Sekhvar the Cold Witness simply the Witness is revealing the cult’s familiarity with it, and handing players a version they can use.

In fiction, ration the names. A chapter that introduces six entities with apostrophes will read as a list, however good each name is. Introduce one, let the reader learn how it sounds, and let the next arrive later. Names also carry point of view: scholars may use a full form, Kharzid Une, while sailors use a nickname, and the difference tells the reader who is speaking.

Finally, match the name to the size of the threat. A blunt two syllable name like Nul’oth suits a local, physical horror. A long trailing name like Bel’othra suits something worshipped for centuries. A mage with a quiet name like Maera Holt can be more frightening than one called Mordaine, if the story shows why people lower their voices.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does eldritch mean?

Eldritch means strange or unnatural, especially in a way that inspires fear: weird or eerie, in Merriam-Webster’s definition. The word dates to the 16th century, may derive from a Middle English word for the kingdom of elves, and is strongly associated with Lovecraft’s horror fiction and the cosmic horror tradition.

What makes a name sound eldritch?

One unfamiliar sound element, used with restraint: a hard opening cluster like Th or Kh, a long stretched vowel, a blunt ending in oth, ul or eth, or a single apostrophe marking a break in the name. Combined with a plain element, an ordinary surname word or a simple English epithet, that one strange element reads as ancient and wrong rather than random.

Are the names in this article taken from Lovecraft or other books?

No. Every name listed here is an original invention made for this article, in the style of cosmic horror rather than copied from it. The famous names of the tradition, such as the beings in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, belong to published fiction. One caution: the mage list uses some real, older first names in new combinations. Selene, for example, is a classical name, the personification of the moon in Greek and Roman religion. The full character names are new, and none of them is presented as a historical or mythological figure.

How do you pronounce eldritch names?

Each name here carries a suggested pronunciation in plain spelling, such as TAL-gor for Thal’gor. These are suggestions, not rules, because the names are inventions. At a game table, the pronunciation the group settles on is the right one.

What is the difference between an eldritch horror name and an eldritch mage name?

A horror name belongs to the entity: usually one strange word, sometimes with an epithet like the Hollow, and it can be hard to say because it is spoken rarely. A mage name belongs to a person: given name and surname in a recognizable shape, strangeness rationed to one element, because the name has to work in introductions and everyday scenes.

Can I use these names in my own game or story?

Yes. The names are original suggestions offered for home games, fiction and other creative projects. Before using a name in anything published or commercial, search it first, because another writer, game or company may already be using the same or a very similar invented name, and check that it does not collide with a name from published fiction.

How do I make an eldritch name without it sounding like random letters?

Build it from parts, not from a keyboard. Choose one strange element, a cluster, a stretched vowel, a blunt ending or one apostrophe, and join it to a plain element, then say the result aloud in a full sentence three times. If it trips you twice in the same place, remove a cluster. Random letter strings fail because they have no plain part for the mouth, or the reader, to hold on to.

Sources & references

• Merriam-Webster, eldritch entry in "Fan Favorites: Your Most Liked Words of the Day 2023" (definition: strange or unnatural especially in a way that inspires fear; word history: originating in the 16th century, may come from Middle English elfriche, meaning fairyland or kingdom of elves; the word can be found in the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft). https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/top-ten-words-of-the-day-2023
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, H. P. Lovecraft (American author, 1890 to 1937; stories in Weird Tales from 1923; the Cthulhu Mythos tales describe ordinary New Englanders' encounters with horrific beings of extraterrestrial origin within an elaborate original mythology; fame increased after his death). https://www.britannica.com/biography/H-P-Lovecraft
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Selene (in Greek and Roman religion, the personification of the moon as a goddess; daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia in Hesiod's Theogony). https://www.britannica.com/topic/Selene-Greek-and-Roman-mythology