Random Title Generator

About a year ago I wrote a random title generator to help myself learn HTML5 and javascript. It’s simple enough in execution; press a button and get five random titles to draw inspiration from.

Sample Output

Dancing Pirate In Lead Ticket
The Automatic Avenger
The Avenger of the Farm House
The Key that Died in the Carnival
The Invisible Cotswold

The results aren’t always terribly sensible and sometimes you might need to tweak what you get — “Dancing Pirate In Lead Ticket” becomes “Dancing Pirate with a Lead Ticket” — but they’re often inspiring, or at least amusing.

How it Works

Basically I took a bunch of old pulp magazines and short fiction anthologies and harvested the different words from them – nouns, verbs, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs – and built javascript arrays out of them. I also created a set of title structures that draws the parts of speech from these arrays. When you click the button, it picks a random structure and then plugs the linked parts of speech into it.

So, "The " + noun + "'s " + noun becomes “The Island’s Mistletoe”

Yeah, my girlfriend thinks I’m a nerd, too.

Further Development

I’m working on version 2.0 now, with a new collection of source titles and a filter for different genres. This takes a lot of time, though, and I suspect it’d be better spent writing, so don’t expect anything anytime too soon.

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