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120+ Gnome Names for D&D and Fantasy Worldbuilding

A gnome name has to survive being said out loud fifty times. That is the part most name lists ignore. You can invent something gloriously silly on paper — four syllables, three plosives, a surname that sounds like a dropped toolbox — and then discover at the table that nobody, including you, can say it twice the same way. Every good gnome name passes one test: it is funny the first time and still pronounceable the tenth.

The other thing worth knowing is that gnomes do not really have a name. They accumulate them. There is the clan name, which is fixed and inherited; the given name, which a parent chose and which the gnome may or may not still answer to; and then the working name — the one earned in a workshop or a burrow, usually from an accident. A gnome introduced formally as Fenwick Bracketbolt is called Sparks by everyone who actually knows him, and that gap between the two is where the character lives. The 120 names below are grouped the way you will use them: the curated pool from our gnome name generator, the two classic subrace flavours, female given names, clan names to mix and match, and the nicknames that replace all of it once someone has seen you blow up a shed.

Popular Gnome Names

These twenty come straight from the hand-curated pool behind our gnome generator. Say them aloud and the rhythm gives the game away: nearly every one is a soft bouncing given name welded to a surname built from two ordinary objects that have no business being welded together. Twiddle and knop. Noodle and whump. That collision is the entire gnomish naming grammar in one line.

Rock Gnome Names

Rock gnomes live where the tools are, and their names read like an inventory of a workshop that has been on fire at least once. The vocabulary is hard and mechanical — cog, bolt, ratchet, crank, gauge, winch — and the given names are noticeably shorter and blunter than their forest cousins’, because a name shouted over a running lathe has to land in one syllable. Use these for artificers, alchemists, siege engineers and any NPC whose first line of dialogue is a complaint about someone else’s workmanship. If you want the same trick with heavier stone and beer in it, the dwarf names list is the neighbouring tradition.

Forest Gnome Names

Forest gnomes name themselves after things that make no noise. Moss, dew, lichen, hush, whisper, burrow — the surnames avoid hard consonants almost entirely, which is exactly why they sound like a different people rather than the same people in a different hat. Where a rock gnome name announces itself, a forest gnome name is designed to be forgotten a moment after you hear it, which suits a race whose signature trick is small illusions and not being found. For a village of quiet, food-loving neighbours in a similar register, see the halfling names list.

Female Gnome Names

Gnomish given names are not strongly gendered in the way human ones are — the split is more about ending sounds than tradition. The names below lean on open vowels and trailing -a, -en and -wen sounds, which reads feminine without pushing the name out of the gnomish register. Every one of them still pairs with any clan name in the next section, so treat the two lists as a grid rather than as fixed pairs.

Gnome Clan Names and Surnames

This is the list to keep open while you run a session. A clan name is the fastest way to make three unrelated NPCs feel like one family, and it is the half of the name that does the worldbuilding — a gnome called Bellowsbright comes from a forge town, one called Fernfitting does not. Each of these follows the same build rule: one concrete object plus one action or texture. Make your own by taking any workshop noun and bolting a verb to it.

Gnome Nicknames and Workshop Names

The most useful gnome name at the table is usually the short one. A nickname is easy to remember, easy for players to shout across a room, and it carries a story the moment it is spoken — nobody asks how Nine-Fingers got the name, they just decide not to hold anything he hands them. Give every recurring gnome NPC one of these on top of a formal name and your players will remember them a month later.

How to Build Your Own Gnome Names

Three passes, thirty seconds. First, pick a given name with a bounce in it — two or three syllables, at least one soft consonant. Second, build the clan name by welding a workshop or woodland noun to an action word, then say it out loud; if you stumble, cut a syllable. Third, and most important, decide what the gnome is actually called by people who work with them. That third name is the one that does the work in play. To generate names shaped to your own setting rather than a generic one, the gnome name generator takes a description of your world and matches its output to it, and the full directory of name generators covers every other race and place you will need.