Alright, let me tell you about this little rabbit hole I went down the other day involving butler names. It started pretty simply. I was sketching out some ideas for a character, needed someone reliable, you know, the classic butler type for this story I’m noodling on.
My very first thought? Jeeves. Yeah, I know. Super original. It’s like the default setting for butlers. But that felt lazy, like I wasn’t even trying. So, I figured I needed to put in a bit more effort.
I grabbed a notebook and just started brainstorming. What sounds like a butler? My brain immediately went to those slightly posh, maybe a bit older British names. Alfred came up, probably because of Batman. Then maybe Reginald, Arthur, Cecil. Stuff like that. They sounded okay, kinda fit the bill, but still felt… bland. Like I’d just picked names out of a hat filled with stereotypes.
So, next step, I did what everyone does: I went searching online. Typed in things like “classic butler names” or “good names for a butler”. And wow, the lists. So many lists. Mostly recycling the same few names over and over again: Jeeves, Hudson, Bates, Alfred, Charles. It felt like reading the same page ten times. Didn’t really give me anything fresh to work with.
I started thinking maybe I was going about it wrong. Instead of obviously ‘butler-y’ names, what about something more subtle? I remembered some characters just had simple last names, like Carson from Downton Abbey. That worked well. So I started thinking about solid-sounding surnames. Stuff like Harrison, Thompson, Davies.
This got me playing around a bit more. What about slightly more unusual, but still grounded, surnames? I spent a good hour just scrolling through websites that list surnames by origin, looking at old English or Scottish ones. It was kind of a slog, honestly. Lots of scrolling, lots of “nah, not quite right.”
I found myself writing down names that had a nice ring to them, even if they weren’t typical first names:
- Thorne
- Finley
- Beckett
- Merriman
- Pemberton
Some of these started feeling closer to what I wanted. Less of a cliché, more of a real person feel, but still with that hint of formality. Pemberton felt a bit too grand, maybe. Thorne was cool, but maybe too sharp?
In the end, after staring at my list for ages and saying the names out loud (which probably made me look a bit weird), I settled on Beckett for my character. It just felt right. Solid, not too common, sounds dependable. It wasn’t some magical discovery, just a process of digging through piles of names until one clicked. Took way more time than I thought it would for just one name, but sometimes you just gotta follow the process until it feels right.
