Every name Namesmith finds gets a coolness score. It is not a random number: it is an opinion about what makes a username feel good, priced factor by factor. This page explains that opinion, so you can read a breakdown and tune the scoring to your own taste.
Look at the usernames people actually envy and almost all of them are one of three shapes. Namesmith's scorer is built around exactly these:
A short, punchy real word. "Frost", "Ember", "Raven". The shorter and more iconic, the better. Obscure dictionary pulls and inflected forms ("Tiffing", "Sires") read as filler, so they earn much less than the word tier suggests.
A deliberate construction on a cool root. "Frostwolf", "Wolfen". Two real ideas joined cleanly, or a strong root with a name-like ending. The root has to carry the name: a word with stray letters tacked on reads as a typo and is scored like one.
A coinage that sounds like a name. "Kaelor", "Veyra". Not a word at all, but it flows like something a character would be called. These are judged by how word-like and pronounceable they are and how well their syllables flow.
A score starts at a base of 25 and each factor adds or subtracts. These are the factors you will see in a breakdown, and each has a weight slider (0 to 3) under Advanced:
Length rewards names near your ideal length (4 by default). Short names are scarcer and read as more OG, so shortness earns a premium.
Real word rewards names built on recognizable words, with curated cool words at the top, plain dictionary words below them, and compounds and suffixed forms in a middle tier.
Naturalness measures how word-like the letter sequence is, using a model trained on English plus a corpus of name-shaped handles. "Kaelor" scores well; "Xqzvt" does not.
Purity docks digits and underscores. A pure-letter name is worth more; turn the weight down (or allow digits) if you disagree.
Aesthetic covers flow and finish: syllable count (two flows best), pleasing endings and onsets, and penalties for awkward letter pileups.
Seed only applies when you enter seed words: it rewards names that stay recognizably built from your word.
Click any score badge in your results to open its breakdown: base 25, then each factor's contribution, summing to the final score. If a name you like scores lower than you expected, the breakdown says exactly which factor disagreed, and the sliders under Advanced let you overrule it. The score is clamped to 0 to 100 for display.
The leaderboard ranks every available name found across everyone's searches by an uncapped score using default weights, so personal slider settings never distort the shared board. The board is also diversified by ending, so one lucky suffix recipe cannot flood a whole page, and names are re-verified against Mojang when the board is shown.
Ready to try it? Generate some names and click the badges.