Dinosaurs are objectively awesome. There’s really no way that can be sensibly disputed, it’s just a fact. Their names, however, are less so. While you get some really good names, like Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor, evocative names which summon an instant and vivid picture, most dinosaur names are less powerful. “Deinonychus”, for example – I’m so busy trying to figure out how to pronounce it I don’t have time to flee in terror. No wonder Jurassic Park called them Velociraptors!

With the paleontological boom of the last couple of decades, and the increasingly detailed understanding we’re gaining of these fascinating creatures, they’re increasingly showing up in odd places. The 3.5 edition Dungeons and Dragons rules, for example, have stats for all manner of dinosaurs, including Deinonychus. What they don’t have, sadly, is any better names for these creatures. This is an oversight.

I want better names for dinosaurs. I want names I can use in a fantasy setting without sounding like my bronze-age mud farmers learned latin and greek at university. Let’s face it, if these animals were running around today, we wouldn’t be calling them “Deinonychus” or “Spinosaurus”. Nobody tries to figure out how to pronounce “cow”, “rabbit”, “dog”, or even “ostrich”. So I decided to come up with some better names.

First, I wanted to see how existing animals have been named. I picked out a few animal names that don’t have an obvious origin in English – bear, wolf, fox, cat and deer – and looked into them.

“Bear” has passed through a number of different languages to reach us. The meaning appears to come from the Proto-Germanic “*beron”, where it meant “the brown one”, which makes sense. From there we can see how the word was modified by dropping off the ‘on’, leaving us with today’s word.

“Wolf”, sadly, is such an ancient word and so deeply connected to the human experience that we have no known meaning for it. Even tracing back to the legendary Proto-Indo-European (or PIE) language, a language spoken by an unknown people at an unknown time in an unknown place, but from which nearly all the languages of both India and Europe descended, gets us to “*wlkwo-“, which meant “wolf”. Not much help there, sadly.

“Fox” appears to also come from PIE, the word “*puk”, meaning tail. It’s very interesting to see that the fox’s brush of a tail has always been a distinguishing feature of the animal, and gives us more hints on how to derive names from older words.

“Cat” gives us much the same story as “wolf” – even going back to PIE, the word just means ‘cat’. There’s no clear origin for the word, so not much help.

I didn’t even bother with dog. It would just be the same story.

“Deer”, interestingly, comes from Proto-Germanic, simply meaning “animal” or “beast”. An interesting hint at the importance of deer hunting in that culture, I think.

So, with these as guidelines, what kind of names can we find for dinosaurs?

Deinonychus started me on this journey, so let’s start with him. The name means “terrible claw”, and is entirely apt for this animal. Deinonychus was a theropod dinosaur, a swift, bipedal hunter with a lethal sickle-shaped claw on each foot, a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth, and almost certainly a full coat of well-defined feathers. I decided to use “terrible claw” as a starting point, and went looking for synonyms in old languages.

I found what I wanted in Old English. OE has a number of words that can be translated to “terrible”, and a number of others for “claw”, so I had plenty to chose from. I selected “Atol + grap”, Old English words roughly translating to “awful grasper”. This seems to me to describe this monster, a beast which could leap onto prey animals and hold on tight with those long back claws. Starting from Atolgrap, it was easy to just drop the first and last sounds, making “tolgra”. I like the similarity of this word to tiger, while at the same time being entirely its own thing.

Velociraptor was an obvious choice to follow the tolgra. In fact, pop culture often mixes up Deinonychus and Velociraptor, largely because Jurassic Park used the latter name to refer to the former animal. So, what can we do with Velociraptor, or “quick thief”?

Real Velociraptors were much smaller, being roughly analogous in size to a dog, so it would make sense to try for a name that sounds speedy. Old English comes in again. “Caf” is OE for quick, while “þeof” has come down to use almost unchanged (the ‘þ’, or thorn, is a character used in OE for the th sound). Cafþeof looks good, but the switch from the ‘f’ sound to the ‘th’ sound is a little awkward, so it makes sense that those sounds would be combined with use, giving us “cafeof”. Soften the middle ‘f’ sound, shorten the ‘eo’, and we end up with “cassif”.

Our lands are now well populated with tolgra and cassifs…what can we find for them to feed on? Time for some herbivores.

Everyone knows triceratops. It’s one of the rock stars of the dinosaur world, so basal to pop-culture dinos that it’s hard to say which is more famous, triceratops of tyrannosaurus. So let’s give triceratops the etymological treatment, shall we?

Rather than just translating the animal’s latin name, I decided to go somewhere different for our three-horned friend. If humans and dinosaurs coexisted, it would make sense for animals like triceratops to be domesticated for meat and other products. As we saw with the etymology of “deer”, domestic animals are often given very generic names at first, so let’s start with one here.

OE gives us “hriþer”, meaning “head of cattle”, but also used for any livestock. In modern English, this is where we get “heifer”, which refers to a young female cow; in our imaginary world of domesticated dinos, we can have it follow a different path. We’ll drop the leading ‘h’ sound to leave us “rither”; lengthen the ‘i’ sound to account for a drawling country accent and shorten the last ‘er’ sound, then drop it entirely, and we get “reeth”. It’s short and simple, and sounds like it could belong in a farmyard alongside cows, sheep, pigs, or goats, so reeth it is.

All three of these dinosaurs, tolgra, cassifs, and reeths, lived at around the same time, during the Cretaceous period; let’s look a little further afield. Let’s look at a beast that lived so long ago, Tyrannosaurus was closer in time to us than it was to this animal. Let’s look at Stegosaurus.

Given that this animal lived so far away in time, it seemed fitting to find it a name from somewhere far away from my own reference points in Europe. What popped into my mind when I thought that? The Maya did, of course. It helps that I’d just watched several documentaries on the subject of the Mayan language, culture and history. So, let’s use Maya. What can we find?

“Stegosaurus” means “roofed lizard”. According to a few online dictionaries, maya gives us “u ho’ol nah” for roof and “huh” for lizard. Following the same method as before – specifically, saying the name over and over and seeing how to make it quicker – we can turn “u ho’ol nah huh” into “hoolnaha”. Drop the last ‘a’ sound, and we are left with “hoolnah”.

So, after all that, we have some new names. Tolgra and cassif, the predatory dinosaurs stalking the edge of the fields, where mill the herds of reeth and hoolnah, pacing nervously and chomping down mouthfuls of vegetation. But is there something else nearby? Do you…hear something?