Username Generator

Set the rules the signup form actually enforces, generate handles that satisfy them, and get them back ranked — by how easy each one is to say and how likely it is that a thousand other people already thought of it.

Ranking beats rerolling

The problem with a username generator is almost never supply. Thirty seconds of clicking gets you two hundred candidates. The problem is that they arrive as an undifferentiated list, and the only tool you have for choosing between them is squinting. So this page attaches three numbers to every handle and sorts on them, and the same scorer is exposed in the box above so you can drop in the names you were already considering. If your own favourite ranks below something the generator invented, that is useful information; if it ranks above everything, you can stop looking.

What the three measurements mean

Length is counted in characters as typed, which is the number the signup form counts. Sayability splits the handle into runs of letters and penalises the things that make a string hard to read aloud: a run with no vowel in it, four or more consonants in a row, a single word past a dozen letters. It is deliberately crude. It knows nothing about stress or about how any particular language behaves, so a handle borrowed from Welsh or Polish will score unfairly. Treat a low score as a prompt to say the thing out loud, not as a verdict.

Guessability is the interesting one, and the most easily misread. It estimates how many other people reached for the same string. A plain dictionary word scores worst — it is the first thing everybody tries. Short handles score badly too: there are only so many five-character strings and they went years ago.

What the score is not is an availability check. The page is static and makes no request to anything, so it cannot see whether a name is registered. It only says how crowded that corner of the namespace is.

Character rules are why good handles get rejected

Every service draws its allowed set slightly differently, and the differences are exactly the ones that break a name you had already fallen for. Some accept underscores but not dots; some accept dots but collapse them; some forbid a leading digit; some cap you at fifteen characters, others thirty.

Rather than ship a table of platform limits that would be stale within a year, this page asks you for the rule and holds the generator to it. Read the small grey line under the signup form's username field and copy it into the rules box. Candidates that break it are never produced, and pasted handles that break it are flagged.

Two rules deserve extra thought. A trailing dot or a doubled separator is rejected almost everywhere even when the character itself is allowed, so this tool never produces one. And if you plan to use the handle as the local part of an email address, remember that some mail providers treat dots as insignificant, meaning the dotted and undotted versions may not be distinct at all.

Picking one you can still live with in five years

A handle outlasts the mood it was chosen in. The reliable failure modes are easy to list: a birth year, which quietly publishes your age forever; an employer or a university, which stops being true; a band, a game, or a joke format with a two-year shelf life; and anything that reads as a boast you will have to keep defending. A concrete noun with no explanation attached ages better than almost anything else, which is why so many long-lived handles are one ordinary object plus one modifier.

Then decide how much linkage you want. Using one distinctive handle everywhere is excellent for being found and terrible for staying separate: given a single unusual string, tools exist that check it against hundreds of sites in one pass, so a hobby account and a professional account sharing a stem are effectively the same account. If separation matters to you, the accounts need unrelated handles rather than variations on a theme, and it is worth generating them in separate runs so you are not tempted to reuse the same root word.

Frequently asked questions

Can this page tell me whether a username is available?

No. It is a static page that makes no network request, so it cannot see any service's account list, and any tool that claims otherwise while running entirely in your browser is not doing what it says. The guessability column is the honest substitute: it tells you how many other people probably wanted the same string, which correlates with availability without measuring it.

Why did the generator refuse my separator?

Because the allowed-character rule you chose does not contain it. Asking for underscores under a letters-and-digits-only rule would make every result invalid, so the separator is dropped and a note explains why. The same applies to the word you ask it to keep: characters outside the allowed set are stripped from it first.

How accurate is the sayability score?

Roughly, and only in one direction. A low score reliably means the handle is awkward; a high score just means nothing obvious is wrong with it. There is no pronunciation dictionary behind it, only vowel and consonant runs.

Should I use the same username everywhere?

Only where you want those accounts publicly connected. Consistency is a real advantage for anything you are building a name on. It is a real cost anywhere you would rather not be correlated, because a single distinctive string is the easiest thing in the world to search for across sites.

What this tool cannot do

It cannot check availability, reserve anything, or tell you that a name is trademarked or already attached to somebody with more lawyers. The word banks are English and finite, so two people with the same settings will eventually see the same handle. The guessability and sayability scores are heuristics written into this page, not measurements of the world, and both can be wrong about any individual name. Nothing is stored: reload the page and your results, your pasted shortlist and your rules are all gone, so copy or download anything you want to keep.