Feature · Stage 3, Check the book

Your reader is not reading the whole name.

Skimming a page, a reader takes the first letter, roughly the length and roughly the ending, and moves on. Two names nothing alike as spellings can be the same name at that speed. This finds those, and tells you whether the crowding is unusual.

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How it works

Groups, never pairs.

Crowded initials, measured against a norm

Every named character bucketed by first letter. A letter is only reported when it carries at least 4 names AND more than 18.5 per cent of your cast, which is just above what the median published novel puts on one letter: 6 names, 17.9 per cent. Both halves are needed, because the share alone fires on a cast of seven and the count alone fires on every book with a large cast.

Shared endings

Three or more names finishing with the same three letters. Three rather than two: two catches ordinary English endings and reports names nobody would confuse.

Same letter, same length

Three or more names starting with the same letter and running to exactly the same number of characters. This is the shape a reader skims, and it catches names that edit distance does not, because Alaric and Andrec share almost no letters in common positions.

Reported as groups

Never as pairs. Pairs grow with the square of the cast, so a book with sixty names would open this screen with hundreds of rows saying almost nothing. A group is one line and one decision.

Use cases

Where name shapes help.

Drafting a cast

Noticing that four of the six people in the war council begin with M before the manuscript is finished.

Second books

Checking new names against the ones book one already spent.

Beta feedback

Answering “I kept mixing them up” with the actual list of names that collide.

Fantasy and science fiction

Invented names drift towards the same sounds, and a shared ending is easier to see in a list than on the page.

FAQ

Questions about name shapes.

Is a crowded initial a mistake?

No, and nothing here is counted as work. Whole published novels put a third of their cast on one letter deliberately, because a family or a house shares a naming convention. This screen reports the shape and leaves the judgement where it belongs.

How is this different from the similar name checker?

That one compares spellings, so it finds Aelric against Aelrik. This one finds names that are nothing alike as strings and still look alike at reading speed: Marek and Mendel share four letters and one glance.

Why groups rather than pairs?

Because pairs grow with the square of the cast. Sixty names make more than seventeen hundred pairs, and a screen listing them is unreadable. The benchmark publishes “characters with a lookalike” for the same reason.

Which names does it read?

The same cast the Cast report lists: terms the classifier reads as people that are also proper names. That classification is inference, so it carries the same caveat and reports its own confidence.

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