[ctorg]

A couple of years ago, as a huge time-waster, I created an Access database where you could enter lots of sample words from a language, and it would take the words, split them up into two-letter sequences, and then rearrange them in random order based on the probability of particular sequences as they occurred in the entered words. You could run it and quickly generate thousands of fake names based on particular letter sequence probabilities. It was pretty neat but not very user-friendly, since I was the only one intended to use it.

Anyway, I used it to create an entire other world. I made up an entirely new set of ethnicities, nations, cities, etc. I used the Access DB to create the city names as well as person names, and I used a separate randomizer to assign city locations based on distances from hubs. I had it make something like 150,000 cities and had about 20,000 names per ethnicity.

It never really occurred to me that this stuff might be useful to someone other than myself.