Help me with my homework

[liv]

Here's a challenge for you: can you suggest me some names, which meet the following criteria:

• Plausible for actual people (ie not sounding like a spammer)
• Not really obvious defaults or clichés like "John Smith"
• Not similar to any famous person or fictional character
• Reasonably easy to spell and make a guess at the pronunciation
• Not rude or comical
• Plausible for someone from a different ethnic background from your own
• If you're feeling really ambitious, I could do with names that sound plausible for children, middle-aged people, and elderly people.

The reason I'm asking is that one of my jobs for the summer is to help write a bunch of case studies and exam questions, and we always, always struggle with the names. We try to get a balance of implied ethnic backgrounds, (and a range of ages and genders is necessary because it's often medically relevant) but we usually end up with way too many variants on things like "Robert Johnson" and "Mary Barker". It's actually surprisingly difficult to come up with names, so what I'm aiming to do is make a list that we can select from, so that we don't keep getting bogged down in inventing names for our imaginary doctors and patients.

Comments

[liv]

Way cool, thank you. I am not sure I'll use those, since we have essentially no Native Americans in the UK, but I'm impressed you can make up plausible names for those cultures.

[ex_rising236]

*nods.*

One of my middle school friends was Cherokee. I learned a very lot from her grandmother and her father. Names are sometimes given as traditional names, sometimes English names, and sometimes English translations of Cherokee names. The last names I picked off of one of the last of the census rolls that I recognised as being still in use.