"What’s in a name?"
Anyone who has spent, I nearly said wasted, weeks of their life
struggling to name an unborn infant knows how time-consuming it can be.
Help is at hand, especially if your ‘baby’ happens to be a story set in
ancient Abyssinia, Shakespearian England or modern suburbia. Muse Names
has the answer.
The package claims to have 40,000 names classified by country or
cultural origin. What turns a long list into a powerful tool for
writers is the way it selects a name to match a key word. If you want
a name that is warm there are hundreds. To name an aggressive character
you might find your choice constrained to Gaelic or Irish. If you want a
brave Ukrainian character just ask and you have four to choose from.
You can search one or all of the data sets by name or meaning. You can
choose the gender and a few other search parameters. If you conceived a
character to be known by their nickname, you can type it in, set the
gender, select the ‘contains’ button and see if the name fits any of the
known names. This Muse is wonderful food for your creativity.
With each name you get an etymological brief and some numerology, plus
New Age insight. The ‘Expression number’ gives ‘the outward expression of
an individual's personality’ while the ‘Soul urge’ attempts to predict the
nature of the character. If you want to explore this concept further,
try:
http://www.astrology-numerology.com/num-soulurge.html
The help system was informative and worth exploring as it explains
the naming conventions of other cultures. On the negative side, Africa
might be too broad a category, but the names are localised in the database
and a database of previous bibliographic appearances would have been
informative, but this is nit-picking. The price tag of $79 also seemed a
bit steep for a simple tool but there is no competition.
It is a pleasure to find a small package that behaves itself. It
installed and, after the review, uninstalled itself cleanly. The commands
were all intuitive and the response was quick, even on the clunky machine
reserved for reviews. As a bit of a nerd myself, I detected the welcome
signs of quality software supporting this product.
Writing reviews is not my favourite occupation. My views on than half
of the products I have reviewed are unprintable they and end up in the
bin. But this was fun. Fun to install, fun to use and fun to discover
those new slants on familiar and new names. Don’t just download ‘Muse
Names’, cough up the $79 fee
for your own copy.
The software comes from Muse Creations Inc.
email: names@musecreations.com
www.musecreations.com
