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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/9279
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'm currently brooding over good character names for a novel I want to write. I was looking at some of the books I read recently, trying to understand why the authors picked the names they gave their protagonists.

In "Before I die" by Jenny Downham – which is one of the best books of my life, by the way – the two main characters are named _Ellie Parker_ and _Mickey McKenzie_. Obviously surnames names are not uniformily distributed over the country, and there is a preference for different first names among different classes, so names will not only give you an idea of which region and social context a person might come from, they also trigger prejudices about a person's character. But since English is not my native tongue, and I don't live in the UK, I have no feeling for the connotations that these two names from that novel will evoke in a native English reader from the UK.

**What connotations do the names _Ellie Parker_ and _Mickey McKenzie_ carry?** What kind of persons do you imagine carry such names?

Original score: 2