Question

I am building a demo dataset for my webapp. I would like thousands of “real looking” names. They should not be names of famous people or fiction heroes or names that will evoke associations. They should all have various and different sounding but realistic male and female names and surnames.

Birth dates and other data can be randomly generated, but right now I am stuck with the names issue. Do you have any creative ideas for this?

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UPDATE: Dave is the Winner

Sample data using the tool he suggested, identitygenerator.com (very user friendly and powerful tool):

mysql> select name, sex, dob from Customer order by rand() limit 30;
+-------------------+---------+------------+
| name              | sex     | dob        |
+-------------------+---------+------------+
| Seth Copeland     | male    | 1958-03-02 | 
| Nomlanga Short    | female  | 1993-09-15 | 
| Cheryl Kerr       | female  | 1962-05-14 | 
| Ralph Murphy      | male    | 1984-07-14 | 
| Whilemina Sparks  | female  | 1975-08-07 | 
| Bernard Atkins    | male    | 1953-02-23 | 
| Kane Lowery       | male    | 1964-02-24 | 
| Victor Johnson    | unknown | 1993-05-31 | 
| Lawrence Powers   | male    | 1965-12-24 | 
| Arsenio Caldwell  | male    | 1965-06-29 | 
| Beatrice Espinoza | female  | 1976-01-09 | 
| Gil Herring       | unknown | 1992-10-09 | 
| Nelle Rocha       | female  | 1956-02-29 | 
| Chantale Benson   | female  | 1969-04-27 | 
| Katell Harris     | female  | 1976-03-14 | 
| Rajah Kline       | unknown | 1974-01-19 | 
| Quynn Pennington  | unknown | 1950-06-22 | 
| Abraham Clemons   | male    | 1982-07-14 | 
| Coby Bird         | male    | 1989-03-14 | 
| Caryn Buckner     | unknown | 1979-12-01 | 
| Kenyon Sheppard   | male    | 1963-02-19 | 
| Dana Chandler     | female  | 1958-05-25 | 
| Dara Hogan        | female  | 1983-10-22 | 
| April Carroll     | unknown | 1954-03-10 | 
| Joan Stone        | female  | 1964-01-31 | 
| Ella Combs        | female  | 1993-11-19 | 
| Sacha Becker      | unknown | 1964-01-06 | 
| Gray Palmer       | male    | 1981-08-06 | 
| Marny Rivers      | female  | 1953-06-02 | 
| Dawn Hull         | female  | 1989-10-05 | 
+-------------------+---------+------------+
30 rows in set (0.02 sec)

Answer 1

There are websites which will generate fake names for you. I usually use fakenamegenerator.com but I think that only does one person at a time. identitygenerator.com has a tool which which will generate a large number of random names – and other personal information – downloadable in various formats.