Monk Name Generator

How this list was compiled: 43 real Old English given names: 31 men's names with Brother in front and 12 women's names with Sister. Rule: a name in the English Wiktionary categories Old English male given names and Old English female given names (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Old_English_male_given_names, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Old_English_female_given_names, read on 2026-10-02 and again on 2026-10-03, CC BY-SA 4.0) whose entry gives the meaning of both of its parts; the meaning on each line is the first sense the entry gives for each part (for Cwenhild the second part is given as "battle", from the dictionary's entry for the word hild, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hild). Written without length marks, with th for the old letters þ and ð and ae for æ; five to ten letters. Left out by script: any name whose entry mentions a saint, a bishop, an abbot or an abbess, any name close to a name on this site's page of saints, and any name with a rude run of letters (319: no two-part meaning in the entry; 175: entry names a saint, bishop or abbot; 22: length or letters; 11: no Old English section; 3: close to a name on the saints page; 3: a rude letter run; 1: meaning too long to print). After the pick, each name was looked up on English Wikipedia in both spellings, and a name whose page speaks of a saint, an abbot, an abbess or a bishop was taken out, with three more by hand (a hero of a poem, a lady of a legend and a name built on the name of a god). 20 candidates were cut (17 a Wikipedia page title; 3 taken out on a second reading), among them Brother Beowulf, Sister Godgifu, Sister Eormenhild, Brother Aldgils, Brother Arwald, Brother Beorhtwine, Brother Deorlaf, Brother Eadnoth. From the names that passed (421 men's, 110 women's), one man's name in every 7 and one woman's name in every 3, in alphabetical order, was taken (60 and 30 names). Three more were taken out on a last reading: Cuthflaed, who stands in Wikipedia's List of Anglo-Saxon saints (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Anglo-Saxon_saints), Saemund, the name of a priest and scholar of Iceland, and Healfdene, a king in the poem Beowulf. On 2026-10-03 every name and meaning was compared again with its Wiktionary entry, and every name was searched again on English Wikipedia in both spellings and in near spellings; ten more names were taken out: four that a bishop, an abbess or a saint bore, three that are a saint's or an archbishop's name in another spelling, or may be, and three for caution, among them a nun named in a charter and the founder of a convent. A second reading that day searched each name in the spellings English Wikipedia itself uses and against its categories of early English bishops, abbesses, nuns and saints. Thirteen more names came out: two that a bishop of Whithorn bore, one that an abbess of Wilton bore, three that a nun or a religious woman bears in a charter or a letter, the heroine of the Old English poem Waldere, and six so that no more than 40 in 100 of these names also stand on this site's page of Old English names. One more, Harold, came out last because it also stands on other name lists of this site. Many of these names were also borne by real people of early England, some of them kings; no line here is about one of them. Licence: own work

How this list was compiled: 15 real offices of a medieval monastery. Each line follows the English Wikipedia article Obedientiary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obedientiary) or, for the precentor, the almoner and the porter, the article on that office (Precentor, Almoner, Porter (monastery)), read on 2026-10-02 and again on 2026-10-03, when every line was compared with its article and three were put further into our own words. The lines are ours. Offices named for a man alone (the guest-master, the novice master, the priest for the week) were left out, because a name on this page may be a Sister's. Licence: own work