RandomNameGeneratorLibrary 2.1.0

DotNetRandomNameGenerator

Generates random people and place names drawn from freely available US census data.

dotnet add package RandomNameGeneratorLibrary

Targets netstandard2.0 (any .NET Framework 4.6.2+, .NET Core, Mono, Unity) and net10.0, with no dependencies. Version 2.1 keeps the 1.2.2 / 2.0 API and adds seed constructors and read-only access to the lists; see CHANGELOG.md. Try it live at https://www.markdavidrogers.com/tools (random names) or through the site's MCP server tool random_name.

What the names look like

Eight of each, straight from the library. Each row comes from a fresh generator built with new Random(20260924) and one GenerateMultiple...(8) call, so you can reproduce them:

The lists have their frequencies stripped, so every entry on a list is equally likely: common names and rare ones sit side by side, and a few first names appear on both the male and female lists because the census recorded them that way.

Usage

Create a PersonNameGenerator or PlaceNameGenerator in namespace RandomNameGeneratorLibrary and call a method such as GenerateRandomFirstAndLastName(). Every method name says literally what it does.

Generating a person name:

var personGenerator = new PersonNameGenerator();
var name = personGenerator.GenerateRandomFirstAndLastName();

Console.WriteLine(name); // "{first} {last}", for example "Mark Rogers"

Generating a place name:

var placeGenerator = new PlaceNameGenerator();
var name = placeGenerator.GenerateRandomPlaceName();

Console.WriteLine(name); // for example "Hoboken"

Male and female first names can be generated with or without a last name:

var personGenerator = new PersonNameGenerator();
var name = personGenerator.GenerateRandomFemaleFirstName();

Console.WriteLine(name); // for example "Jane"

More than one name can be generated at a time. There are methods for each gender and for last names alone, and each takes the number of names to produce:

var personGenerator = new PersonNameGenerator();
var names = personGenerator.GenerateMultipleFemaleFirstAndLastNames(5);

Console.WriteLine(names.First()); // for example "Rose Jones"

For reproducible names, pass a seed or your own Random:

var personGenerator = new PersonNameGenerator(42);           // same seed, same names
var another = new PersonNameGenerator(new Random(42));       // equivalent
var name = personGenerator.GenerateRandomFemaleFirstName();

Console.WriteLine(name); // for example "Lindsay"

The same functionality is available as extension methods on Random:

var randomObj = new Random(42);
var name = randomObj.GenerateRandomFemaleFirstName();
var place = randomObj.GenerateRandomPlaceName();

The lists themselves are exposed read-only, so you can count them or pick your own way:

Console.WriteLine(PersonNameGenerator.LastNames.Count);     // 88799
Console.WriteLine(PlaceNameGenerator.PlaceNames[0]);        // first entry of the place list

IPersonNameGenerator and IPlaceNameGenerator cover the generating methods, for dependency injection and for mocking in tests.

Thread safety

A generator made with the default constructor is safe to share between threads (it uses Random.Shared on .NET 6+ and a well-seeded Random per generator on .NET Framework). A generator made around your own Random, including the extension methods, is only as thread-safe as that Random, which is not at all: use one generator per thread. The lists are parsed once per process, on first use, and are safe to read from any thread.

Unity

The netstandard2.0 build works in Unity: no dependencies, no runtime reflection beyond reading its own embedded resources, and no runtime regular expressions. Copy the DLL from the package's lib/netstandard2.0 folder into Assets/Plugins, or use a NuGet-for-Unity tool.

Data

Person names are ASCII and Title case (Mark, Rogers). The place list drops the state and the classification word (city, town, CDP, ...), keeps accents on Puerto Rico names (Bayamón zona urbana, Mayagüez zona urbana) and lists a name once no matter how many states have it, so Franklin is exactly as likely as Popponesset.

GenerateRandomFirstName picks male or female with equal probability first, then a name from that list, so any one male name is about 3.5 times likelier than any one female name. Use the gendered methods if you want uniform odds within a list.

The lists are embedded resources (RandomNameGeneratorLibrary/Resources.*.stripped, LF line endings, UTF-8). They were produced by the tools/CensusTools console project in this repository, which reads the Census files as Latin-1 and removes duplicates; it is not part of the package. The CensusListStripper and FileCompressor classes still in the library are the original one-off tools, marked obsolete, and will be removed in 3.0.

Building and releasing

dotnet test
dotnet pack RandomNameGeneratorLibrary -c Release -o artifacts

CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) restores in locked mode, builds, checks formatting, runs the tests on Linux (net10.0) and Windows (net10.0 and net48, which exercises the netstandard2.0 build), collects coverage and packs on every push. To publish: add the entry to CHANGELOG.md, bump <Version> in RandomNameGeneratorLibrary.csproj, tag the commit v<version> and push the tag. The publish job checks that the tag matches the version, signs in to nuget.org with Trusted Publishing (GitHub OIDC, no stored API key; a NUGET_USER secret holding the nuget.org profile name lives in the nuget environment), pushes the package and creates a GitHub Release with the .nupkg and .snupkg attached. Package validation compares the public API against 2.0.1 at pack time, so an accidental breaking change fails the build.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.