About the Random Ethnicity Generator
Character rosters and demo databases tend to drift towards whoever the author already knows. Drawing an ethnic group at random is a quick correction. The 100 entries here are real peoples rather than skin colour labels: Yoruba, Quechua, Sami, Uyghur, Bosniak, Malayali, Ainu, Cree and ninety more, chosen to cover Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania and the Americas without turning into a list of nation states.
Groups are named the way the encyclopaedic sources name them, so the output is safe to paste into a worldbuilding document or a research brief. Where a name is genuinely contested the list uses the broadly accepted English form. Nothing here ranks or scores a group, and the tool does not attach traits, appearances or stereotypes to a draw. What it gives you is a starting point for further reading before you write.
Common uses are casting a table of characters for a novel, seeding demographic columns in a mock survey, and prompting students to research a people they have not met in class. If you are filling a fake customer table rather than a character sheet, the Random Nationality Generator gives demonyms and the Random CSV Generator builds whole rows at once.
How to use
- Choose how many groups you need, one per character or one per table row.
- Keep No repeats on so a cast list does not double up.
- Press Generate and read the draw as a research prompt, not a description.
- Copy the list or download it to drop into your notes.
Common questions
- What counts as an ethnicity here?
- Named ethnic or ancestral groups such as Hausa, Tamil, Basque or Lakota, not census colour categories and not passport nationality.
- Does the tool describe how each group looks?
- No, and that is deliberate. It returns a name so you can research the group properly rather than lean on an assumption.
- Is the list exhaustive?
- Far from it. A hundred entries can only sample the several thousand ethnic groups in the world, so treat a draw as a doorway.
- Can I use this to fill a database column?
- Yes, set a high count with repeats off, then paste the column into your fixture file or spreadsheet.