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2. Look at names of real countries in the region where you are setting your fictional country, and try to match the pattern. For example, there are several real countries in south Asia with names ending in "-stan", such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kazakhstan. So a name ending in "-stan" would sound plausible.
In others I decided that soft vowels and consonant combinations would be used. In one culture, each name had a y in it somewhere. You want special characters used, so Enur could become 'nur or En'r or E'r or En'. Kryshyn could become K'shyn, K'sh'n, 'ryshyn or Ky'yn. Remember to say the name aloud. If you cannot pronounce it, you might have a ...
Similar to many American 'menace' tropes having Asian-sounding names, the name for anything sketchy in British fantasy/sci-fi sounds, to my biased ears, like Middle Eastern territories that disagreed about being British colonies. It pulls me out of the story, little voices jump up and say "Das racist!"
13. Read literature from the country or period you want to write about. If you want to write about norse mythology, open the Edda and get names there. If you want to write about the french revolution, open Diderot and find names there. And so on. Read history, read sagas, read original literature. There is your source.
Let the characters in the story decide what to name magical things. Here's a process that I've used for naming magical things. Maybe you will find it useful too. Consider word origin. Research the etymology of normal words that could be used to describe the magic. I've used Wiktionary for this.
5. My experience has been to concentrate on the story - first and foremost. That is what drives the success or failure of any kind of fiction. So, as you create each new character, if a name fails to materialize immediately, you might try labeling the first unnamed character as "AAA," the second as "BBB," and so on.
+1 '"fayree" could potentially leave the viewer wondering why you didn't just say "fairy."' Urban fantasy implies modern cultural context. Now if there was an outbreak of animalistic vampirism in Norway, "draug" might catch on. But in an English-speaking country in the present day, people WILL call a vampire a vampire. –
It is a random name generator you can choose the influences and the origin of the name and each name has a meaning when it is generated. A real meaning. All names come from most of the cultures that inhabit our dear planet. On the same page you can search for names according to meaning and/or sex.
The name of the species I came up with is "Dracanthropos", which is composed of both draco and anthropos, being "dragon" or "snake" and "person", respectively. But soon I felt uncomfortable with this, since in this world there is no Greek or Latin. On the other hand, how do I describe them without taking humans as reference?.
1. I was thinking of making the characters use racial slurs, because there's no way that in a fantasy setting people are progressive and respect people of every group, but I wasn't sure what would be acceptable and what would be unacceptable given the current culture of wide acceptance and zero tolerance for racism.