A Chraracter name

[Ryu-Kami]

I looking for a good name for a character. Does anyone know any good words that have similar means to "potential" and/or "possibility"?

[saridon]

I looking for a good name for a character. Does anyone know any good words that have similar means to "potential" and/or "possibility"?

for a start if you want a character with a name that means something like what you said, i suggest using a translator and finding the word for it in some other language (latin is usually good) since the english equivelent would probably sound shit compared to something more forgien to people.
thats one of the easiest ways to make one.

[Daniel Krispin]

Yeah, best to try other languages. Latin might or might not be okay. Greek also. Those are the only two languages I know enough to be able to look up (well, maybe German, too, but I don't know it off hand so I won't bother.) Latin...

Nope, exactly with 'possible' and the like, it's Latin we get our English word from, so it's not much use.

But Greek, which I'm way better at...

Dunatos is the word 'possible', an adjective, so I suppose you could say that, because you could say 'to dunaton' is the substantive 'the possibility', Dunaton could be a name meaning 'possible.' But feel free to Anglisize any of my suggestions however you want. We say 'Achilles' for the Greek 'Akhilleus', after all. So, yeah, Dunaton. But don't leave it there. It's common practice to write Greek upsilons as y in English (hence we get the Greek Kuklops most often being written Cyclops.) What does it become? Dynaton. And hey, guess what? We DO use that word in some form in English. A dyno, a generator or something like that. A thing with potential. So if you use a name like Dynaton, it has that same feeling in English, and there actually IS the connection.

Maybe you could mix something together. Say, okay, here I'm just going from random thought. But maybe 'Atellos'. Okay, I doubled the l, but that's only to make it look better (somehow, it does look better than Atelos.) Telos is 'end' in Greek, so that means 'endless', sort of implying open possibilities.

[Ryu-Kami]

Wow. Thanks alot, Daniel. I had using another language, in mind, but I forget about Greek. I appreciate it.

[Brohaz]

Check out www.behindthename.com, I'm sure you'll find a name that'll work.

[Ramsus]

The nice thing about Korean, Japanese, and Chinese is that you can throw some Chinese characters together to make a name if you want to, with several different ways of actually saying it depending on which language you choose to read it with.

Study older languages, word etymologies, and name origins for a few days (weeks, months, years...) to get an idea of how many of the common names you find in America came into being, then just sort of artificially derive some names from similar origins using ancient words of your choice. Just pay attention to formative patterns with names of similar origin to what you're creating, so you can approximate how the original name would have been put together and then changed over the course of hundreds of years as it moved across countless boundaries and languages into the present world of your story. Also, keep in mind that English spelling is somewhat morphological as opposed to phonetic, so the spelling itself should show signs of its origin.

Of course, if you're really creative/creating your own world and you know a little about linguistics and cultural development, you can create your own languages, ancient and modern, from which you can derive all sorts of names.

[Lord J Esq]

Allow me to venture an artistic solution: Rather than looking for a directly literal expression of your intended meaning, try to envision something that conveys your meaning, and then either use that word or draw upon another word that relates closely to it.

For instance, the names Seed or Easel would imply potential quite straightforwardly. If you do not want to use names that occur as regular English words, or if you want to be less conspicuous with your name meanings, you could create new words, which may be done either literally, for instance by truncating the word "incipience" into the name Incipi, or figuratively, perhaps by taking a "possibility" metaphor such as the Bermuda rig, looking at its predecessor, the gaff rig, and creating the name Gaffrig.

All of this has the virtue of occurring organically within the English language. Not that resorting to other languages or gibberish words is wrong, but, since everybody else suggested those approaches, I'd like to suggest English. =)