Rand Name

I'm a big fan of reading, especially high fantasy. Which means I'm also a big fan of Robert Jordan's masterpiece, The Wheel of Time! One of my friends often jokes that I'm her personal library on the series as she often quizes me about absure topics from the books. I LOVE these books.

Which brings us to this project, which I've decided to call Rand Name. (get it?) I'd been wanting to make an API for a while but I couldn't decide what to make. I really like the Random User Generator API so I wanted to take some inspiration from that. After completing another readthrough of Wheel of Time, I was considering how many characters were in the series and it hit me! Since I have a habit of using Wheel of Time names as test data anyways, what if there were a generator to pick them for me!

All that was left was to compile a list of character names. Luckily, u/JaimTorfinn shared a list of characters that actually appear (as opposed to just mentioned) in the books in a Reddit post. All I had to do was prepare and then ingest that data. Currently I only added the names, but I plan to add more. Perhaps Ajah, for applicable characters, and maybe some made up addresses. Ideally I'd like the data to be usable in practical situations... pretty soon ALL of my tests will be filled with characters from Rand Land.

Notes:

Middle names... They're not big on middle names in the Third Age. Thus there's only 163 characters (in this dataset) with middle names. Most of them are Atha'an Miere with names like Jorin din Jubai White Wing. It seems that their names are structured using nobiliary particles. As a result of the way I parsed the character list, Jorin's name is listed in the database as first_name: Jorin, middle_name: din Jubai White, last_name: Wing. This is, of course, not a correct interpretation of the name. I left it alone since there are already so few entries with middle names but I may go back and clean it up to make all of the Atha'an Miere middle names 'din' and shift the rest of it over to the last name. I still believe this would be incorrect but it would look better when parsing the data and it would still allow them to contribute to the short list of names with middle names.

Update January 20 2024:

In December of 2023, u/JaimTorfinn (the Reddit user who shared the dataset I initially used for this API) recommended in a comment I use a better one of their datasets. After adjusting the way I processed the data import functionality, I was able to expand the names list and add a new field: Title! From this point on, the names list will be more complete and include titles like "High Lord" and "Queen."

With this new list, I used the alphabetical names which list titles/honorifics like "Queen" and "Mistress" after a comma. However, some of the names themselves are complete titles, such as "Daughter of the Nine Moons." My title filter was designed to filter out titles based on the presence of a comma like "Admira , Master." If the full name in the dataset was a title in and of itself, it probably slipped through the cracks. So prepare yourself for names like "Daughter" | "of the Nine" | "Moons".

Usage:

For now the API can be accessed via:

The results will look like this:

{
  "results": [
    {
      "name": {
        "title": null,
        "first_name": "Piqor",
        "middle_name": null,
        "last_name": "Ramshalan"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Documentation