How did Brandon come up with his names?

[The Feruchemist]

I’m just curious. I’m a new fan having just discovered his works. I can see that he has a bit of an alphabet for Elantris, but what about Mistborn? Storm light archive? Does he go with whatever he thinks sounds cool with no root meaning, or does he have a pattern he follows? Thoughts?

[Khyrindor he/him]

For the most part he figures out the culture of the person, then bases the names off of baby names from a similar country, with a little bit of tweaking. For example, Kelsier, Demoux and Vin are supposed to sound French, and Hammond, Elend and Straff are supposed to sound German.

[Nathrangking he/him]

Some are also inspired by people that he knows Mosh for instance is a corruption of the name of his editor.

[Yezrien]

For Stormlight, he’s created systems for naming in different cultures. The simplest is the Vorin names, which are palindromes (Ialai), or palindromes that are one letter off (Shallan). (Diphthongs, like th, sh, and lh, count as one letter.)

There’s a different system for Alethi names, which you can see bits of in Oathbringer. It involves suffixes like -din and -rin, which mean “son of” and “born of” or something like that.  But you don’t need to speak Alethi to come up with Alethi-sounding names.

Thaylen names have lots of consonants (especially V) and very few vowels.

[The Feruchemist]

Hey all of that makes sense. So his names aren’t just whatever. That’s awesome!