Goblin names are the only naming tradition in fantasy built almost entirely out of insults. Look at the twenty names in this generator and you will not find a single one that a proud parent would choose. Snotblister. Wartnose. Scabfoot. Pushover Wobb. These are names that were given by somebody else, and stuck, and the goblin wearing one has stopped fighting it.
That is not a limitation to work around — it is the whole reason goblin names are fun to say and easy to remember. A dwarf name asks you to respect a lineage. A goblin name tells you a story about the worst day of somebody’s life in one compound word.
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The English word goblin arrives in the fourteenth century, and for most of its history it meant something closer to a household nuisance than a warrior — a small malicious spirit that soured milk and hid tools, closer kin to the hobgoblin and the brownie than to anything with a spear. The modern tabletop goblin, organised into warbands with a chain of command, is a twentieth-century invention layered on top.
The naming style, though, kept the older flavour. It descends from the English nickname tradition — the same habit that turned medieval bynames into surnames like Whitehead, Longshanks and Barefoot. A byname described a visible feature, a defect, or an incident, and it was applied to you by your neighbours whether you liked it or not.
Goblin names in this pool work exactly that way, with the cruelty dialled up. That gives you something structurally useful: every goblin name in this list implies a community. Somebody had to be there to notice the wart, the scab, the snot, the flinch. A goblin’s name is proof it does not live alone.
These are the exact twenty names the generator draws from — pool-verified, which means this is the list stored on the site, not a sample written to fill this page.
Named for the body (nine). Snaggletooth · Grimbleshank · Wartnose · Scabfoot · Bogglebelly · Foulmug · Raggedclaw · Chompfang · Snotblister
Named for the habit (six). Sneakwhisk · Muckgrub · Skulk Grit · Gobby Nibbler · Pushover Wobb · Fizzlefart
Named for the threat, real or claimed (five). Gritch Stabber · Kreeble Snark · Nerkle Spit · Crankle Snout · Wizzlecrack
The three groups do different work at the table, and knowing which one you have drawn saves you a lot of improvising.
A body name is the safest default: it describes something your players can see the moment the goblin steps out, so the name and the description reinforce each other for free. A habit name is a behaviour cue — Sneakwhisk should be the one that vanishes when the fight turns, Pushover Wobb should be the one who surrenders first and talks. A threat name is the most interesting, because it is the only group where the goblin might have chosen it: Gritch Stabber is a name a goblin would give itself, and whether it has ever stabbed anything is a question your players get to answer.
Name the goblin who talks, not the goblin who dies. A named goblin is a promise to your players that this one matters. If you name all six in the ambush, you have named none of them. One name in a group of six turns a random encounter into a scene with a spokesman.
Let the goblin resent its name. The single best thing you can do with Pushover Wobb is have it introduce itself as something else and be corrected by its own side. That one exchange establishes the group’s pecking order, gives your players a lever, and takes ten seconds.
Use two-part names for rank. Five names in this pool have a given name and an epithet — Gritch Stabber, Kreeble Snark, Nerkle Spit, Crankle Snout, Gobby Nibbler. Single-word names read as rank and file. If you want an internal hierarchy without inventing one, hand the two-part names to the ones giving orders.
1. It is grand instead of grubby. Vaelthorn the Cunning is not a goblin name; it is an elf name with a goblin attached. Goblin naming is low, physical and specific. If the name would look at home on a banner, it is wrong.
2. It is a random syllable pile. Zkgrbl gets the ugliness and loses the meaning. The reason Wartnose works and Zkgrbl does not is that one of them tells you what to describe when the goblin appears.
3. Every goblin is disgusting in the same register. Twenty variations on filth is exhausting inside one session. The pool deliberately spreads across body, habit and threat, and mixes tones — Fizzlefart is comic, Raggedclaw is not. Alternate them or the goblins blur into one green mass.
They come from a fixed pool of twenty names written and checked by a person, rather than assembled fresh on each press. A finite pool can be read end to end and kept consistent in tone, so every name has been looked at by a human. The honest trade-off is repetition: press enough times and the twenty come round again.
Because the style descends from the English byname tradition, where a descriptive nickname was applied by your neighbours rather than chosen by you. That gives goblin names a built-in implication that is useful at the table: somebody was there to notice. A goblin with a name has a community that named it.
Register and origin. Orc naming in most fantasy leans on harsh invented phonetics that sound like a language — the name means something in a tongue the players do not speak. Goblin naming leans on plain English compounds that mean something immediately and unflatteringly. Orc names sound foreign; goblin names sound like playground cruelty.
Yes, and the two-part names in this pool suit that best — Gritch Stabber, Kreeble Snark and Nerkle Spit read as a person rather than a punchline. A single-word insult name works for a player character too, but it commits you to playing the joke every session, which gets old faster than most players expect.
Yes. These are ordinary English compound words and no attribution is required. Individual names are not generally protectable. The usual caution stands: avoid names closely associated with a specific commercial setting, which is why this pool avoids franchise-specific goblin naming conventions.
No. There is no sign-up, no email step and no limit on presses. Nothing on this site puts a name behind a form.
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Goblin names work by a different grammar from every other fantasy race. Elves inherit names, dwarves carry clan names into exile, but a goblin is called something — by the warren, after the incident, and rarely to its face at first. The name is a nickname that fought its way into permanence. That’s why the classic goblin name is either a scrap of mouth-noise (Snik, Fizz, Grak) or an unflattering compound built from a body part and a flaw. Get that grammar right and almost any syllable salad will read as goblin; get it wrong and you’ve just named a small orc.
Scouts, pickpockets and tunnel-creepers. Sibilants and soft consonants do the work here — a skulker’s name should sound like it was whispered. Compounds built on quiet verbs (slink, skitter, hush, pad) tell the table exactly what this goblin does before it does it.
The opposite acoustic: front-loaded plosives and violence compounds. Raider names are war cries shortened to fit in a mouth — Smashgob, Riptooth. Note the goblin habit of misspelling its own ferocity (Skullcrusha): goblins heard the big folk’s war-names and copied them slightly wrong.
Goblin naming is unisex in structure — earned epithets, mouth-noise roots — but names read as female in most settings when they take the -a, -et, or -ina endings goblins pilfered from human naming. A matriarch usually keeps a childhood noise-name (Nixxa, Zibbet) and adds an epithet only once she runs something.
The boss name is a two-part joke goblins take completely seriously: a stolen title of nobility stapled to a goblin name. The grandeur is the point — nothing says goblin king like a title three sizes too big. For a boss who should genuinely frighten the party, invert the rule: one short, hard name and an epithet earned in blood.
Scrap-goblins name themselves after the tools and treasures they hoard. Cog, bolt, spring, wick — the vocabulary of the junk pile becomes a name the way a trade once became a human surname. These fit alchemist goblins, trap-makers, and any warren that lives downstream of a dwarven forge.
Pick the section that matches the goblin’s job, then roughen the name against your world: swap a consonant, shorten it, or bolt on an epithet from a local landmark. If your setting needs names for the goblins’ larger cousins, our orc names list uses a related but heavier naming grammar, and the dwarf names list makes a good contrast for the folk whose mines goblins keep moving into. For every other race and role, browse the full directory of name generators.
These 90 curated names are hand-picked, not generated. The names in the generator above come from this site’s finite, hand-checked goblin pool — every one verified free of protected intellectual property.
Every generator below draws from its own finite, hand-checked pool: Kobold Name Generator · Orc Name Generator · Troll Name Generator · Gnome Name Generator · Lizardfolk Name Generator · Dungeon Name Generator · All Race Generators
