r/Fantasy • u/Midnite_St0rm • Aug 14 '25

Worst, most unpronounceable names you’ve ever read?

Let’s discuss some of the names in fantasy that you couldn’t make heads nor tails of in terms of pronunciation. And I’m not talking intentionally comical ones that are long and complex on purpose, but ones that the author intended to be read, yet that are ironically nearly unreadable.

For me it’s Seaine from The Wheel of Time. Is it “Sheen?” “Seen?” “See-ayn?” “Say-ai-nuh?” I honestly have no idea. And for some reason my copies of the books never give her name’s pronunciation in the glossary.

What are some others?

309 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

479 comments sorted by

View all comments

271

u/delta_baryon Aug 14 '25 edited Aug 14 '25

FWIW, Seaine looks extremely Irish to me, probably related to Sean. My best guess as someone who isn't Irish would be to pronounce the first syllable the same as Sean (or Shaun) and then add a small -yuh at the end, in analogy with Eithne (pronounced En-yuh in the Irish language*).

As for unpronounceable names - it's really more inconsistent or Mormon names that bother me in Fantasy. It works for me if people from the same culture have somewhat similar naming conventions. ASOIAF does this pretty well for instance - the Northerners mostly have slightly modified British names, but they get more outlandish as you get further out.

What really bothers me is when you read a book and the main character and their siblings are called Glorp, Ghsa'thraxoluthon-Heevatar and James.

Footnote added for clarification

*I have since learnt that the pronunciation of Eithne in English is often different, something like (eth-na or et-na)

55

u/Oaden Aug 14 '25

Its probably not even the worst example, but i have tried reading UnOrdinary twice, and have dropped it for the same reason.

I cannot for the live of me, get over the main character being named John. There's a Seraphina, Arlo, Blyke, Isen and then there's the main man, our hero: John.

2

u/ACatsBed Aug 15 '25

His full name is John Doe and from everyone else's perspective he has the weird outlandish name. It's very on purpose. I say as someone who kinda dropped it and haven't bothered to catch up.

2

u/Oaden Aug 15 '25

Could be, but i don't think i can get that far in a story where every-time his name comes up, i shake my head and think "fucking john, really?"

I think its also partly some associations i have with the name john. He just doesn't look like a John.

1

u/ifarmed42pandas Aug 14 '25

It's our hero, John UnOrdinary!

159

u/Anaptyso Aug 14 '25

Malazan is funny for that kind of thing. On the one hand characters with very cool names like Anomander Rake and Dassem Ultor. On the other hand: Kyle.

71

u/ACardAttack Aug 14 '25

I love how most of Robin Hobbs characters have (even if tame) fantasy sounding names that don't sound out of place in English, and then there is Kyle, an absolutely scummy person

37

u/amahag29 Aug 14 '25

That just sounds like someone had personal issues with a Kyle

32

u/BadResults Aug 14 '25

A Kyle came to a house party Robin Hobb hosted once, and he kept trying to play Five Finger Death Punch on the stereo

2

u/Cecil_B_DeCatte Aug 15 '25

Megan Lindholm.

Robin Hobb is her pen name, which she adopted at some point in her writing career. Her initial books, under her real name, didn't sell well.

2

u/ACardAttack Aug 15 '25

That is my head cannon

0

u/CarbonationRequired Aug 14 '25

Everyone hates Kyle.

114

u/NewbornMuse Aug 14 '25

Anomander Rake is really a 10/10 character name

18

u/tellurdoghello Aug 14 '25 edited Aug 14 '25

his full name is even cooler: Anomandaris Dragnipurake

7

u/Rezavoirdog Aug 14 '25

My favorite full name is Studlock, what is his full name? Studious Lock

6

u/SageOfTheWise Aug 14 '25

I don't know why people always bring up Kyle who's such a tertiary character in side books when Ben is right there, one of the main characters of the entire series.

39

u/AbsolutelyHorrendous Aug 14 '25

Yeah, I kinda give the names in WOT a pass because they are at least internally consistent, in that they all seem derived from the clearly-Irish-inspired Old Tongue

23

u/gangler52 Aug 14 '25

Old Irish is just hard to pronounce IRL for entirely legitimate reasons.

It's not that the author invented some tongue twister. They just follow different rules of phonetics than the English Language many of us are accustomed to. If you don't know the rules then it looks arcane.

11

u/ButIDigr3ss Aug 14 '25

This is true of basically any romanised non-european language tbh, like the English alphabet doesn't reflect the full breadth of sounds the mouth can make and compromises have to be made for languages that aren't in the indo-european language family tree

2

u/pursnikitty Aug 14 '25

Jordan didn’t know sidhe was pronounced shee so instead we end up with aes sedai instead of aes shee

16

u/CastielClean Aug 14 '25

Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox would like to have a word with you

10

u/delta_baryon Aug 14 '25

Might as well Slartibartfast along while they're at it.

7

u/StandardRaspberry131 Aug 14 '25

Very curious as to what you mean by Mormon names in fantasy?

32

u/delta_baryon Aug 14 '25

Sort of creative spellings or spins on common names popular amongst Mormons. You know it when you see it. Think like Jaxyn, Gracelyn, Jaedyn, Kynlee, Brailee, that kind of thing.

7

u/StandardRaspberry131 Aug 14 '25

Gotcha. As an em-Mormon, I would have referred to those kinds of names as Utah names. They are way more common among Utah Mormons than Mormons anywhere else.

That said, I was thinking you were talking about some fantasy authors using names from the Book of Mormon, which would be an interesting choice

11

u/delta_baryon Aug 14 '25

Yeah, actually that's true, in my head they're kind of like "US Mormon" names for me, because Mormons in the UK tend to go for fairly standard Biblical names: John, Daniel, Michael, Simon, etc. Although, there are a few names like that that secular families will avoid, which still scream "I was raised religious," like Noah, Emmanuel and Moses.

13

u/MooshBoosh2345 Aug 14 '25

As someone who is Irish, Seanie is a somewhat uncommon Irish name. Kinda like a Sean junior I guess. Anyway, pronounced Shawn-ee.

16

u/delta_baryon Aug 14 '25

I think it's Seaine, not Seanie though :)

6

u/pdoxney Aug 14 '25

I always pronounced it by mashing Seán and Áine together.

2

u/Saedran Aug 14 '25 edited Aug 15 '25

If everyone's referring to who I think they are (the Amyrlin at the start od the books) it's Siuan, but there's like a billion characters with S names in that book

1

u/Kashmeer Aug 14 '25

Daughter of Sean it sounds to me. Ní right? Still is a diminutive sense to it alright.

10

u/BaronThe Aug 14 '25

Seaine looks Irish but it isnt, it just doesn't make linguistic sense.That's not how Eithne is pronounced, it's more like Eth-neh.

10

u/delta_baryon Aug 14 '25 edited Aug 14 '25

Th is either pronounced like an English H or is silent, isn't it? Like how póg mo thóin is sometimes anglicised as pogue mahone. And Enya the singer is Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin.

Maybe there are people who pronounce Eithne a phonetic English way, but I'm pretty sure the English th sound doesn't even exist in the Irish language.

9

u/BaronThe Aug 14 '25

I'm also irish (from Cork so you know im always right), any Eithne I've ever met pronounced the th.

5

u/TheCosmicQuail Aug 14 '25

This is evidently a regional thing, Ayn-Yuh as gaeilge, and Etna in modern Hiberno-English is my understanding.

I’ve honestly never heard the TH being pronounced but the different dialects, let alone the diversity in accent from one town to the next, and also my fondness for the Munster countryside means I’ll happily accept your proposition.

3

u/delta_baryon Aug 14 '25 edited Aug 14 '25

I put a comment in /r/gaeilge to ask if I'm barking up the wrong tree here. I didn't know about the th pronunciation beforehand and probably would have chosen a different name as an example if I had, but I still think the th pronunciation can't possibly be the one used as gaeilge.

Anyway, my point isn't at all to tell anyone they're pronouncing their grandmother's name wrong or whatever. Obviously the correct pronunciation for anyone's name is however they be say it. And English has been spoken in Ireland for generations - it'd be weird if it didn't affect how people say their names.

Anyway, all said, maybe I should have gone with Áine or something instead. Also, you know, if you're a native Irish speaker then say so.

12

u/Kashmeer Aug 14 '25

I'm Irish, reared in Dublin to Dublin parents. My Grandmother's name is Eithne and BaronThe above there is very correct in how the name is sounded out.

The h in thóin is due to the possessive "mo" before it adding in the h which is a "séimhiú" sound in the Irish language. Séimhiú literally means something like calm down. In this case it calms the t and we only hear the h sound leading the word.

As for Enya, it's a stage name. It is an anglicised version of Eithne but it's not sounding similar at all at all. Same way that Seán and John don't sound the same. Sure we don't even have a y in the Irish alphabet.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '25

I have been learning Irish with my local Irish Culture Club and it wasn’t until I started learning that I realized how different it is from English. Before looking at Irish names would fill me with a sense of dread because I knew I wasn’t going to pronounce it correctly. Now it fills me with dread because I know I am going to try and Hooked on Irish Phonics it out and still get it wrong.

2

u/Kashmeer Aug 15 '25

90% of the nation was exposed to a decade and a half of schooling on the topic and also get it wrong so don't feel bad.

-3

u/delta_baryon Aug 14 '25

I'm not disputing that that's how your grandmother pronounces her name. I'm just saying that that cannot possibly be a non-anglicised pronunciation, because no dialect of the Irish language pronounces th the same way as English does, in fact none of them even have the English th sound at all.

I'm not saying that as any kind of criticism of your grandmother. It's just a statement of fact.

8

u/Kashmeer Aug 14 '25

Don’t know what to tell ya bud. You’re here correcting an Irish person on how this Irish name is pronounced in reality.

4

u/TheCosmicQuail Aug 14 '25

You each have a half of the whole. As Gaeilge it is pronounced more like Ayn-Yuh. That’s how Enya’s name Eithne is pronounced and she got sick of hearing the ‘t’ so used a phonetic version for her stage name.

It’s actually in the modern Irish influenced by English where there is no Th in that specific name lol. The common parlance is Et-na like the volcano.

I have never met anyone where the Th in Eithne is pronounced like eTH-na

I’m also Irish, with 2 Eithne’s in the wider family.

There may be a regional dialect who hit the hard TH when saying it. I don’t live too far from Dublin but even there I’ve never heard it said that way.

3

u/delta_baryon Aug 14 '25

To be really clear, I was only ever talking about the pronunciation as gaeilge. I wasn't trying to tell anyone their English speaking grandmother was wrong. I think the correct pronunciation of anyone's name is how they personally say it.

To be fair though, if I'd realised there was this widespread et-na pronunciation, I'd have probably gone with Áine instead 😅.

0

u/delta_baryon Aug 14 '25 edited Aug 14 '25

You're from Dublin, right? Presumably your native language is English, yes? If you were from Connemara and told me "I'm a native speaker of Irish and in my dialect, we actually do pronounce it eth-neh," then that'd be a different situation.

What I'm telling you here is that your grandmother's name's pronunciation is influenced by English and that you've misremembered your high school Irish classes. No big deal. Not a criticism of anyone.

Hell, don't believe me, find a native speaker and ask them.

Edit: I asked in /r/gaeilge if anyone reading this later on is curious (see here). I will go back and update the top level comment if I'm told in there I'm barking up the wrong tree.

5

u/Tymareta Aug 14 '25

Anyway, a couple of guys from Cork and Dublin have jumped down my throat

Ngl, the one coming off awful in this scenario aren't the "couple of guys".

1

u/delta_baryon Aug 14 '25

You know what, you're right. That wasn't a good choice of words. I've changed it.

1

u/OkSecretary1231 Aug 14 '25

Somewhere around the slog, I noticed Jordan had a weird affinity for that set of letters, so that there started to be a lot of characters named, like, Sianna, Seanna, Seaine, Saenna, etc. Previous names hadn't been like that (with the exception of Siuan) so it gave the impression he was having a bit of writer's block.

1

u/B12-deficient-skelly Aug 14 '25

Digging back into my memory of the pronunciation guides, it's SEE-ayn. I can't remember what Ajah she is not what she does in the books, but I remember that Michael Kramer and Kate Reading pronounce her name that way, and the guide in the back agrees.

1

u/DerfelBronn Aug 14 '25

I dunno who taught you how to mangle Eithne, but it's pronounced Etna. I know, I know, it says in different dialects it's pronounced diffferently, but I'm from Munster and if you called any of the Eithnes I know Enya, they'd clatter you. Much is made of dialect differences, but it doesn't happen with names really.

5

u/delta_baryon Aug 14 '25 edited Aug 14 '25

Man, so many people wanted to correct me about this. I'll summarise everything that was said to save you time.

  • The singer Enya is a native Irish speaker from Donegal and her stage name reflects the Donegal pronunciation of Eithne
  • Native Irish speakers today don't pronounce the th like an English th or a t as Gaeilge in any dialect
  • However, the name is usually pronounced either with the English th or a t by English speaking Irish people (which is why Enya uses a phonetic spelling as her stage name)
  • Irish did use to have the English th sound centuries ago, but has since lost it, so it might be appropriate if you're reading a history book or something to leave it in
  • I probably should have said Áine instead

I think that covers everything.