Note: See the new repository nerdy-naming-schemes for more lists in English
This is a collection of thematic word lists that you could use to name a dozen or a few hundred files, servers or variables if it doesn't matter what they're called. I read somewhere that you're a bad programmer if you give variables random names, but I don't really know which legit use cases there are. And I don't have to know - that's the beauty of open source.
Anyway, this collection didn't start in an office. Do you remember playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri? One of the things that made it an epic game was the characters of the faction leaders, divided not by nationality, but by ideology. The city names, on the other hand, were not as distinctive. It felt like they were all created by a 19th-century poet. And I needed more names on big maps. So I created my own city names, using semantic domains that seemed suitable for each faction.
The themes folder contains the thematic lists in plain text, plus some comments, while the basenames folder contains the faction files that you'd put in the Alpha Centauri folder. SMAC used seperate lists for water bases; if they ran out, names of land bases could be used. If a faction ran out of names, the general list could be used. After that, the faction name followed by a number was used.
| Faction | Land bases | Water bases |
|---|---|---|
| Believers | Gods (261) | Prophets (25) |
| Gaians | Land mammals (347) | Fishes (265) |
| Hive | Codes A0-Z9 (260) | Numerals 00-99 (100) |
| Morgan | Forbes Global 2000 companies (200) | Currencies (77) |
| Peacekeepers | UN countries (193) | UN organs and organisations (23) |
| Spartans | Guns (169) | Battleships (129) |
| University | Elements (112) | Heavenly bodies (55) |
| General | Star Trek characters (204) |
Most of these lists contain some diacritics. Besides general comments at the top, the lists don't contain any explanations, so that you can copy a whole list at once.
The prophets are Islamic prophets, because there's a canonical list of prophets in Islam. The lists of prophets, codes, numerals, companies, guns, battleships and Star Trek characters could also be used in English, and an English version of the UN country list is included.