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Can someone help me name this character?



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Tue Jan 27, 2015 10:05 pm
Yuna229 says...



My character is a 16\17 girl (still deciding her age), rather tall, slim (but not too much), with hazel eyes and hair, sort of inverted triangle face.She is from the 19th century and usualy wears dark dresses and sometimes wraps ver hair in a bun and wears a brown hat with two big dark feathers.
She is curious, realist, does not believe in God or any deity (not until she has seen one or a proof that they actually exist), perspicacious and always has a smart answer to everything people say to her. She loves having fun with her friends, she's generous and she likes to spend hours and hours at a nearby little forest. She lives in Portugal, so portuguese names are preferable (remember, portuguese names are not brasilian names). So, if you need more info, just ask! Thanks in advance for answering!
  





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Tue Jan 27, 2015 10:29 pm
Lefty says...



Victoria was the first name that came to mind but it's not Portuguese.

These are a few names I found that are Portuguese:

Adelina; meaning noble and ready for battle
Adriana; meaning dark
Anita; meaning grace, favor
Carmen
Julia; meaning youthful

Just a couple ideas. Hope this helped!
Hear me out, there's so much more to life than what you're feeling now. Someday you'll look back on all these days, and all this pain is gonna be invisible. - Hunter Hayes
  





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Tue Jan 27, 2015 10:39 pm
Vervain says...



Hello! It sounds like you've got a grasp on where your character is coming from, you're just facing this hurdle of a name.

One of my first suggestions would be to characterize her parents, as suggested in our Name Central thread. If her parents are particularly religious, they may stray towards giving her a religious name; if one of them has a special love for travel, they may name her something related to another land, or to terrain, or to travel itself.

Really, the character wouldn't be in charge of their own name unless they actually picked it themself in their world. So, while it can be tempting to follow name symbolism and name your good character something "good" and your bad character something "bad", that's unlikely to happen except through some pseudo-ironic twist of fate.

Another suggestion here would be to check out a few name lists pertaining to your character's ethnic information, such as Behind the Name. That page is set to feminine Portuguese names, but you can set it to masculine, unisex, or any, and change the nationality, with the drop-down boxes on the right.

Good luck!
stay off the faerie paths
  





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Tue Jan 27, 2015 10:42 pm
Blues says...



For reference (if you aren't familiar with Portuguese names although I assume you are), have a look at this wikipedia page.

I'm going to actually suggest that you don't wait for us for someone to name her; every character grows as a person and that name becomes part of them. For example, giving a very happy-go-lucky person the name "Dolores" (meaning sorrow) is probably not a good fit, assuming you're not going for irony.

What are they like when they have fun with their friends? What are they like when they're around people generally? Are they quite soft-spoken or very abrasive? A name like Constaça could be seen as a bit harsher thanks to the plosive C and not flow as well as say, Yara, for example. The name Maria would have more Catholic connotations than others. Simple things such as these instantly give the reader a quick first impression of the character, and you can use these for an extra layer of meaning as the story goes on. Plus, it also tells us a *lot* about what their parents were thinking when they picked that name.

What about the role that they play in story as a whole? How do they fit in with the people around them and how does the story itself change her? What about the conflict that she faces in the story, internally and externally? What about the relationships they have in the story?

Baby name websites are great for these things if you need to find some names. I'd personally start off with the sound you want and then go into the meaning of that name or perhaps the other way round; you might want to look at this for modern day names. You'll have to search a bit more for names popular in the 19th century but they tend to be Biblical names and then comes the nicknames too.

Good luck!
  








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