One Steve Limit / Literature

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Creators

• Isaac Asimov:
  • Foundation (1951):
    • A subtle aversion occurs because "The Encyclopedists" has a character named Jord Fara, while "The Merchant Princes" has a priest named Jord Parma. Fortunately, both are minor and appear in two different stories, set roughly a century apart, which minimizes the confusion.
    • The protagonist of "The Traders" is Lanthan Devers when originally published, but also one of the minor characters in "The General (Foundation)" was given the name Lanthan Devers, so when Dr Asimov edited "The Traders" for publication in Foundation (1951), he changed the name to Limmar Ponyets, to clarify that these weren't the same characters.
  • The Naked Sun has a scene where a robot is asked whether it's certain it's making a call to the right Gladia, and the robot doesn't understand the question. Apparently, when a planet only has 20 000 people living on it, it can afford to play the trope 100% straight.
  • The short story "Mother Earth" has two characters named Moreno and Moreanu. Asimov himself lampshades this in his notes on the story in the collection The Early Asimov, admitting that he never noticed the similarity until the story appeared in print. He also has no idea why the magazine editor didn't notice either and ask him to change it.
• Consistently averted by Jane Austen, who even gave her own name to several prominent characters (the second leads in Pride and Prejudice and Emma).
  • Sense and Sensibility has three Johns: Sir John Middleton, usually referred to as "Sir John"; John Dashwood, usually referred to as "Mr. John Dashwood" or "Mr. Dashwood"; and John Willoughby, always referred to as "Willoughby". Willoughby's first name is only revealed in the signature of a letter from him.
  • In Pride and Prejudice there are two Catherines: Mr. Darcy's aunt, Lady Catherine, and Lizzie's sister Catherine, although she almost always goes by "Kitty". Mr. Darcy's first name, Fitzwilliam, is almost never used, in part because it is the same as his cousin's last name. The expected confusion of having five Miss Bennets does not occur, though: As the ranking daughter, Jane is "Miss Bennet" alone, while her sisters are identified by full name.
  • Persuasion also includes three characters with the first name "Charles", with a fourth one mentioned in dialogue. There are also two "Walters" in the same book.
  • The title character of Emma also has a baby niece named Emma. In fact, her little nieces and nephews are all named after older family members — their parents, aunt, uncle, and grandfather respectively.
• A series of detective stories set in Wales, written by Rhys Bowen, plays on the supposed tendency of the Welsh to have many people with the same name and deal with it by attaching profession-based nicknames. The hero, Constable Evans, is "Evans the Law"; the gas-station owner is "Evans the Pump". Women go by the first name and a nickname: Constable Evans' schoolteacher ladyfriend is "Bronwen the Book". This practice may be Truth in Television.
• Orson Scott Card considers this trope one of the most important rules to follow for any writer. Even though his most well-known series has unrelated major characters named Peter and Petra. Who end up getting married...
• The novels of J.T. Edson contain both Belle Boyd and Belle Starr, although these are Historical Domain Characters.
• William Faulkner:
  • The Sound and the Fury contains two characters (one of whom is female) who are named after their uncles. The male character narrates the first part in a disjointed stream-of-consciousness that cuts between different times, often in mid-sentence, and draws no distinction between references to his being called Maury as a child and that also being the name of Uncle Maury; likewise for Quentin, his brother, and Quentin, his niece. (An appendix lists the previous Quentin and Jason Compsons: ours are III and IV, respectively.)
  • The Sartoris family, important players in many of Faulkner's other works, tear this trope to shreds. There's John Sartoris, who had a son named Bayard Sartoris, who had a son named John Sartoris, who had a son named Bayard Sartoris... yeah. Bring a flowchart.
• Nikolai Gogol penned a short story titled "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich", in which the trope is only slightly averted by the fact that the eponymous characters have different patronymics.
  • Gogol's a repeat offender — The Inspector General features two (unrelated) characters named Piotr Ivanovich Bobchevsky and Piotr Ivanovich Dobchevsky.
• John Green seems fond of averting this trope:
  • An Abundance of Katherines has two main characters named Colin, one of whom has dated nineteen girls named Katherine.
  • Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan has two protagonists, both named Will Grayson.
• An aversion of this is heavily Played for Laughs in a short story by Norwegian author Hans E. Kinck, That Stool, set in a secluded valley, on a farm where every single male has the same name (Taddak), and every single female likewise (Gunhild). The farm folk are incredibly lazy, and the naming happens to be "because it`s too stressing" to come up with new ones. Hence, they all go by nicknames: old Taddak, Little Taddak, big Taddak, Taddak from the other Farm and so on.
• R.A. Salvatore has created the characters of Cadderly and Catti-Brie, who have crossed paths from time to time. Try reading the names outloud and not mis-pronouncing one for the other.
• Hubert Selby inverts this trope by naming all his main male characters Harry. In Requiem for a Dream there is a Tyrone that is a main character, but that's the only exception.
• In Robert Silverberg's The Alien Years, a rugged retired colonel named Anson founds a self-sustaining community of rugged survivors on his ranch near LA. Many of his descendants are named Anson, making it hard to tell them apart. (It doesn't help that they all have the same role in their community, and all act the same.)
• Dana Stabenow averts this with three recurring characters named Ekaterina: the matriarch Ekaterina Shugak is always called by her full first and usually also her last name or by the honorifics "Auntie" or emaa; her granddaughter, also named Ekaterina Shugak, goes by Kate, and a friend's child named after Kate is called Katya. Similarly, her book Restless in the Grave includes a character named Jeannie Penney, always referred to with that form of her first name and usually with her full name, and another named Jean with no last name given.
• P. G. Wodehouse reused first names quite a bit within his 'verse, but was inclined to change them to enforce the limit within a given work. Rupert Psmith became Ronald Psmith when in the same book as Rupert Baxter, and the valet Brinkley was renamed Bingley when he was needed in a story set at Brinkley Court.
  • Bertie Wooster is surprised to realise that his valet Jeeves even has a first name, let alone that he has friends who are familiar enough with him to call him by it - but he is relieved to find that Jeeves' first name isn't Bertie, otherwise it would have felt really awkward.

• 100 Cupboards has Frank Fat-Faerie (short for Franklin) and Frank Willis (short for Francis). The former lampshades this:
  Fat Frank: You can't go wrong with a Frank.
• 1066 and All That makes a few jokes about figures in British history with similar names:
  • Cardinal Wolsey's successor was "Cromwell (not to be confused with Cromwell)".
  • "Walpole ought never to be confused with Walpole, who was quite different..."
• In Stephen King's 11/22/63, Jake runs into a phenomenon which he believes is the past 'harmonizing' with itself. One result of this is that he often runs into people who share the same, or very similar, names to people he knows very well. He notes how he has a habit of running into Georges quite frequently (George Amberson is his time-travel nom de guerre).
• The Accursed Kings: Being a Historical Fiction, the series takes pains to avert this thanks to using full names or having people refer to a relative's position along with their name (i.e. "our uncle Charles", "our brother Charles", etc.). And even then, some characters disapear altogether: The Evil Aunt of Villain Protagonist Robert d'Artois (third of that name) has a son also named Robert d'Artois who thankfully doesn't appear. Lampshaded during a banquet scene where the children all seem to have the same few names, saying that calling "Jeanne" caused six heads to turn. Also, the cardinal narrating the final book, snarks that Robert's son Jean seems perpetually amazed that the king of France shares a name with him.
• The Across Realtime series has four characters named Wili Wachendon, with the three in Marooned in Realtime being named in honour of the hero of The Peace War. It still manages to keep them distinct, as the latter three are referred to respectively as "Wil", "Bil" (or "Billy") and "W. W.".
• The Alice Network: Léonie van Houtte's real Code Name was Charlotte Lameron, but the author changed it to Violette Lameron because she already had a Charlotte, never mind that her Charlotte St. Clair went by Charlie.
• Animorphs: There are at least three Yeerks named "Iniss" (some number here), including Chapman's Yeerk (Iniss 226). This was originally Justified, as "Iniss" and the other Yeerk names were meant as ranks rather than personal names. There are also two Yeerks named "Esplin 9466": the Big Bad, and his twin brother (who has a Bill Gates Expy as a host, and never shows up again after the book he appears in.) This is also Justified, as they are twins (which is also why their names end with "66": apparently all Yeerk twins have a double number at the end of their names.)
• Ascendance of a Bookworm: The trope is enforced when the orphanage managed by Myne gets a Doorstop Baby and she's told she can pick any name for him as long as it's not the name of an other orphan.
• The Black Arrow: The story features protagonist Richard Shelton and historical character Richard Plantagenet, usually referring to the former as "Dick" and the latter as his real life nickname "Crookback".
• Played with in a children's book called The Adventures Of Ali Baba Bernstein. The protagonist, a kid named David Bernstein, hates how boring and common his name is. He is one of four Davids in his classroom at school, and he finds eight David Bernsteins listed in the phone book, presumably all adults, and realizes that some of the Bernsteins listed may have sons named David.
• Averted in the short story "American Gothic" (no connection to the painting) whose main character is named Amanda Goodchild. She is later the subject of a letter by one Edward Goodchild, the context thereof suggesting they are not related.
• Even similar themed names can be confusing. Some readers kept mixing up Rosie and Daisy in Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.
• Tolstoy's Anna Karenina notably gives the first name "Alexei" to both the title character's husband and her lover; the latter also has a brother named Alexander, though at least he goes by "Sasha". There's also an "Annie", but that makes sense given that she's Anna and Vronsky's daughter.
• In the Anne of Green Gables series by L. M. Montgomery, there are seven unrelated characters with the name "Jim" or some variant of it: James A. Harrison (Marilla and Anne's neighbour), Aunt Jamesina, Jim Wilcox, James Armstrong, James Grand, Captain Jim, and the war baby Jims. Of course, this doesn't count Anne's son Jem, who is named after Captain Jim, or Jem's son Jem, or Jim Anderson, who is Jims' father and namesake, or Aunt Jamesina's father, who is her namesake. Whew.
  • A milder version is Priscilla Andrews and Priscilla Grant. There is no confusion, as they never share a scene and the first is nearly always referred to as Prissy.
  • Anne also has two that aren't namesakes in any way, shape or form: Janet Sweet's sister and Miss Cornelia Bryant's mother were both named Anne. Add this to the fact that Anne has three namesakes: Diana's daughter Anne Cordelia, her own daughter Nan, and her grand-daughter Anne. So that makes three characters who can be referred to as Anne Blythe. (Confused yet?)
  • In Anne's House Of Dreams, Miss Cornelia mentions a family with twelve boys where the oldest and youngest are both named Neil. The family calls them Big Neil and Little Neil.
  • A character in Anne of Green Gables engages five sisters successively as her companion/servant. The oldest is named Charlotta, and the character never bothers to learn the names of Charlotta's younger sisters, referring to them in turn as Charlotta II, Charlotta III, Charlotta IV, and Charlotta V.
  • In the later books, Anne and Gilbert's children tend to be named after characters we've met. Although they usually go by nicknames, it still takes some concentration to keep track of who's who: in addtion to James ("Jem") and Anne ("Nan"), there's Nan's twin Diana ("Di") named after Diana Barry, Walter (named after Anne's biological father), Shirley (a boy, named after Anne's maiden name), and Marilla ("Rilla"). Then Anne's kids use the same pool of names for their kids: the five that are named are Jem's kids Jem Jr., and Walter, Rilla's son Gilbert, Nan's daughter Di, and a granddaughter named "Anne Blythe" (the narrative doesn't make it clear if this is Jem or Shirley's child.)
• The aversion is a big plot point in Wilkie Collins's Armadale, which features four different characters named Allan Armadale (granted, two of them are off the table immediately). Collins simplifies the reader's life by having one of the living Allans take the name Ozias Midwinter.
• Atlanta Nights seems to be a demonstration of why this trope exists. There are three characters named Richard Isaacs, Isaac Stephens, and Stephen Suffern. Isaac Stephens interacts with each of the other two at least once, and both times the characters are referred to by whatever name would cause the most confusion. And, this being Atlanta Nights, the narrator has trouble keeping them straight.
• Aurora Cycle: Fish out of Temporal Water Aurora Jie-Lin O'Malley is rather bemused when she finds out that she's at Aurora Academy, the headquarters of the Aurora Legion, in the Aurora star cluster.
• The Baby-Sitters Club introduced a child beauty pageant winner named Sabrina Bouvier. The club members agree that they think this is a silly name - but later, another Sabrina Bouvier appeared as a school classmate of the girls.
• Battle Royale features characters named Yuka, Yukie, Yukiko and Yuko. Of these, Yukiko teams up with her friend, Yumiko, to make a futile attempt to stop all the killing, while Yuka, Yukie and Yuko are part of the group of girls who spend most of the Program holed up in the island's lighthouse. Yuka also shares her surname, Nakagawa, with the story's female lead, Noriko, though they are not related.
• Averted in Beauty Queens. Miss Ohio, Miss New Mexico, Miss Arkansas and Miss Montana are all named Caitlin.
• In the Betsy the Vampire Queen books by MaryJanice Davidson, the eponymous Betsy has a stepmother named Antonia, spitefully addressed as The Ant by Betsy. Later, a psychic werewolf also named Antonia joins the True Companions. Betsy, horrified by the reminder of her Wicked Stepmother, tries to change her name to Toni, but Antonia won't have it. At one point, Betsy muses on the oddity of meeting two different people with the same unusual name, and for the rest of the next two books the group has to clarify to which Antonia they're referring. (The issue is settled when werewolf!Antonia takes a very high-caliber bullet to the head.)
• White Jackson and Black Jackson from Blood Meridian. Neither Jackson is amused by the nickname. Black Jackson eventually decapitates White Jackson, but the nickname sticks.
• Michael Connelly book Blood Work features two characters named James: James Cordell and James Noone.
• Averted in Border, KS. The main character named his son, Ryan Richards, after his brother-in-law and best friend Ryan Aquino.
• Aldous Huxley's Brave New World mentions this problem: Lenina Crowne works with someone else with the last name Crowne, due to an extremely small naming pool and no creativity allowed; it's implied that children are named by bureaucratic fiat, since they're all grown externally. However, none of the main characters have shared names.
• Because the firstborn daughter of any family in A Brother's Price is given the title/name "Eldest", there are a lot of Eldests around. However, non-family members usually call the Eldest of some other family by her last name. Technically there are three Eldest Whistlers shown, but Jerin only calls one of them by that name - the others he calls Mother Eldest and Cousin Eldest.
• Captive Prince:
  • Prince Laurent's namesake turns out to be his hated uncle, the Regent. However, the Regent is only known by his title.
  • Played for Laughs in the third book when Laurent is undercover as "Charls the cloth merchant" and runs into the real Charls, who plays along and explains that they're both Charlses, named after their grandfather Charls.
• The Kage Baker story The Caravan From Troon takes place in a land where Smith is a very common name. The protagonist, a prominent secondary character, and at least two background characters are named Smith, and apparently none are related.
• Averted amusingly in John Connolly's Charlie Parker Series, where the main character's dog Walter shares his first name with a secondary character who hadn't appeared for a while when the dog was introduced, with no explanation. When the original Walter came back, it's explained away as a case of We Named the Monkey "Jack", which the human Walter doesn't find very flattering.
• Cherub Series: Their are two characters named Jake, Lauren's friend's brother Jake Parker, and Junior Handler Jake McEwen. The latter is always referred to by his last name, to avoid confusion.
• There are two Seans in the Maeve Binchy novel Circle Of Friends; the one who's pretty much joined at the hip to his girlfriend Carmel is referred to by his friends as "Carmel's Sean".
• Cuando quiero llorar no lloro: the three main characters have the same given name, Victorino, but they are differentiated by their last names... who began with the same letter and sound. They never met, though, since the theme of the novel was the "parallel lives".
• In the George Eliot novel Daniel Deronda, the title character is trying to help Mirah find her brother, Ezra Cohen. He finds a character who goes by Ezra Cohen who is a completely different person than the Ezra Cohen, who goes by his middle name Mordecai when he finds him.
• Darkover averts this and repeats the same names over and over and over again throughout the generations. One book has multiple Davids.
• Peggoty in David Copperfield is usually referred to by her surname, because she shares her first name with Clara Copperfield.
• Lampshaded by Lindsey Davis in her Marcus Didius Falco novel Deadly Election, set in Ancient Rome. Private investigator Flavia Albia is hampered in her murder inquiry by a family all of whose female members are named Julia. In the Roman style they are distinguished from each other by second names - Julia Optata, Julia Versecunda, et c. But this still slows up the investigation. Davis even includes a family tree on page 345 headed "A Family With Too Many Julias". But she still has to investigate eight related women. All called Julia something.
• The Day Santa Stopped Believing In Harold: Exaggerated— When Santa brings up Harold, with no last name, Mrs. Claus somehow knows which "Harold" out of all the boys in the world he's talking about.
• Andrey Kurkov's Death And The Penguin features two characters named Misha. One is the eponymous penguin. The other is a person, usually referred to as "Misha-non-penguin".
• Nick Cave's novel The Death Of Bunny Munro has two characters named River. Oh, and three named Bunny Munro (grandfather, father, and son). Just in case you thought the title was a spoiler.
• Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Griboyedov and Aleksandr Sergeyevich the manservant of the latter in The Death of the Vazir Mukhtar. But these are historical people.
• The Deed of Paksenarrion:
  • It's a minor plot point in the first book that a new recruit shares a name with one of Paksenarrion's original training group, and that Paksenarrion herself has a similar name to Duke Phelan's deceased wife.
  • There are also several names that pop up among minor characters. There are two Ansulis (along with one Suli and one Suliya) and seven or eight Sims, depending on whether the two Sims serving in the Halveric household are the same guy or two different people.
• One minor character in the Deverry novels was referred to as Red-haired Trevyr, mainly because the mercenary unit he served with once had a second man named Trevyr in it, who had black hair. This naming convention continued long after the death of Black-haired Trevyr, simply because his colleagues had gotten used to addressing him like that.
• In E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Devils Elixirs there are four characters named Francesko, as well as two Aurelies (one named after the other). To make matters even more confusing, everybody is related to everyone else, often illegitimately. Needless to say that this prime example of German Dark Romanticism heavily features doppelgangers.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid does this trope: There are 3 Bills and 1 Billys, One Bill is the lead singer of a band, one bill is a comic artist, and One bill is a celebrity. Also there are 3 Marcuses, One is brothers with another Woodley (interestingly, a classmate also has the same name as the latter Woodley) and the others have the name as a nickname, and they are a part of a campsite group Greg got invited to. Also there are two Mr. Guptas 
• In the Diogenes Club series, the main protagonist is Richard Jeperson, but some of the prequels feature his namesake, Richard Riddle. In the stories where he appears, the latter goes by "Dickie" or "Dick". In "Cold Snap", Richard Jeperson's antagonist is named Richard Cleaver; the narrator generally refers to them as "Richard" and "Cleaver" respectively. (Derek Leech, who doesn't like either of them, takes a childish pleasure in averring that they're both Dicks.)
• Played with in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, when Gordon talks to his sister Susan's answering machine. Gordon's secretary is also named Susan, and he keeps making asides to clarify which Susan he's referring to.
• Averted rather confusingly by Clive Cussler in his recent Dirk Pitt Adventures books, which have two characters named Dirk Pitt, with fairly similar personalities, both on an adventure at the same time, and without any nicknames to tell them apart. It's possible to get halfway through a chapter before finding out which character you're reading about, unless you realize that Dirk Pitt Sr. tends to be referred to as Pitt, and Dirk Pitt Jr. tends to be referred to as Dirk. He's also had at least a dozen minor characters named Leigh Hunt (who fortunately only appear one per book).
• Discworld:
  • A rather amusing subversion because of the irony, in The Last Continent: "Rincewind!" "Yes?" "No, no, I mean the Archchancellor." "But... I'm named Rincewind." "There's a coincidence. So am I." They eventually decide they must be related simply because they share such an uncommon name. Made even more interesting when Archchancellor Ridcully showed up, although each Archchancellor made sure to refer to the other with a lower-case "a" in "archchancellor." Doing nothing to abate the confusion.
  • Additionally, in Eric, Rincewind meets Lavaeolus, whose name translates to "Rinser of winds".
  • And then there's Ridcully, High Priest of Blind Io. It doesn't count, though, because he is Archchancellor Ridcully's brother. Fortunately, they're mostly referred to by their titles, and anyone who's important enough to call them by name knows them well enough to call them "Mustrum" and "Hughnon", respectively.
  • Unseen Academicals introduces us to "Bledlow Nobbs" who is so insulted by being thought to be related to Nobby Nobbs that the second half of the book calls him "Bledlow Nobbs (No Relation)".
  • Interestingly, though, Death drops his nickname Mort as soon as an actual character named Mort is introduced.
  • In Maskerade there's one character called Henry Slugg and another called Henry Lawsy. However, it turns out that Slugg is Lawsy's father, and Lawsy was named after him.
  • Not to mention the multiple Williams in the books. We have William de Worde, William the Gonagle, a dead William in Borogravia, and his son William, a Will in the opera house, and probably more.
  • Pratchett also plays with the nicknames that are given to characters of the same name:
    • In Hogfather, one of the thugs hired by Mr. Teatime is called Medium Dave because Ankh-Morpork's underworld already had Big Dave, Fat Dave, Mad Dave, Wee Davey and Lanky Dai.
    • In The Wee Free Men we learn that there are so many Feegles that are called Jock that the Gonnagle in training's name is "Not-As-Big-As-Medium-Sized-Jock-But-Bigger-Than-Wee-Jock Jock". And he insists on the full name every time, because "Not-As-Big-As-Medium-Sized-Jock-But-Bigger-Than-Wee-Jock-Jock" is a time-honored name for the Pictsies.
  • Averting this trope en masse is a big part of the Igor tribe's identity. There is also a man named Igor who specifically isn't an Igor, but who nonetheless has an Igor-like profession (barman at an undead bar).^note  He actually appeared first, which naturally led to some confusion when the Igor Clan was introduced, as his characterization differed from theirs. A later book clarified that he "wasn't an Igor, but was merely called one" and implied that jokes on the subject were something of a sore point with him.
  • Probably accidental, but the name "Ron" turns up a lot in Feet of Clay. There's Ron the barman at the Mended Drum, Ron the rat-catcher whom Wee Mad Arthur beats up, Ron's Pizza Hovel from which Vimes orders Vetinari's Klatchian Hots (without anchovies), and Canting Crew regular Foul Ole Ron. A later book would introduce Ronnie Soak, milkman and fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. And Lord Ronald Rust, sometimes referred to as Ronnie by other aristocrats.
  • Charlie the Vetinari lookalike from The Truth shares his name with an animate skeleton appearing in Unseen Academicals.
  • There's a Lupine who is a werewolf and another who isn't.
  • Unseen University has two faculty members with the first name Horace. However, one of these two is the Librarian (as revealed in The Art of Discworld), and the only other person who knows that is Rincewind.
  • Reg, God of Club Musicians in Soul Music, and Reg Shoe, zombie rights activist in Reaper Man and later books. According to Sir Terry he picked names like "Ron" and "Reg" for the cultural baggage they have with British readers, and "Reg is a good name for a dependable guy, the sort who runs the skittles league (I know this, 'cos my Uncle Reg did...)"
• In the Divergent series, there's Jeanine Matthews (the Big Bad of the first two books) and Matthew (the Nice Guy scientist from the third book). Though admittedly, Jeanine is hardly called anything but, well, "Jeanine".
• In Erich Kästner's book Das doppelte Lottchen (a.k.a. "Lottie and Lisa"), the mother is called Liselotte and her twin daughters Lise and Lotte.
• Dr. John Seward from Dracula, who is often called Jack by the other characters so as not to be confused with Jonathan Harker. Of course, it doesn't help that Van Helsing still refers to him by his given name.
• Dragaera: Steven Brust hangs a lampshade on the similar names issue in an authorial aside apologising for having characters named Aliera, Adron and Aerych who spend a great deal of time discussing things for a sizeable chunk of "Five Hundred Years After". He explains that he will use descriptions rather than names where possible to avoid confusion.
• Averted in the Dreamscape Voyager Trilogy.
  • Subverted with Nanette, which is the name of both Zayne's First Mate, and his little sister, but the narrative leads readers to think they're the same person until it's revealed Zayne met the former on the same day the latter was murdered as a child.
  • Jainin is the name of Zayne's father, and also a mercenary he encounters in Andaerhal, and coincidentally he sets them both on fire.
  • A Downplayed example is Cassidy, whose legal name is Cassandra Durant IV.
• The Dresden Files:
  • A joke version: When Harry's recovering from his injuries in the care of Michael's family, one of his kids calls Harry "Bill" because "we've already got a Harry" (Michael's youngest, named, in fact, after Harry). By the time the Carpenters' son Harry is in grade school, the boy goes by "Hank" instead.
  • Even funnier when you consider that there's already a "Billy", although the girl probably didn't know that. Billy Borden starts going by "Will" in later books as well.
  • Also in the same series there are two Michaels, the human knight of the cross, and the Archangel... Although the latter is only mentioned in passing it does cause some confusion when another knight of the cross Saya mentions that Michael recruited him... "no not that Michael." There is also Mike the Mechanic, who does repairs on the Blue Beetle, but he is only mentioned a few times (and always in conjunction with the Blue Beetle needing repairs), and never shows up in person.
  • There's also three Margarets, though two of them go by nicknames. The first is Harry's mother, Margaret LeFay, who is a Posthumous Character. The second is Margaret "Molly" Carpenter, another one of Michael's kids who Harry takes on as an apprentice after she develops magical abilities. The third is Harry's daughter, Margaret "Maggie" Angelica, who was named after her grandmother.
• In Goethe's Elective Affinities, the alter ego nature of the two main male characters is signaled by them both being named Otto (although one goes by "Eduard" and the other is referred to as "the Captain" throughout the book); it's also no coincidence that the other two main characters are named CharlOTTe and OTTilie. Given that Goethe wrote that "There is not a line in it I have not lived", you can take it that the four characters with the same name are all author stand-ins. Then there's the baby who's the child of all four of them (it sort of makes sense in context); easy to guess what they named him. Eerie coincidences department: Eight years after the publication of the novel, Goethe's son August got married to a woman called Ottilie (von Pogwisch).
• Lampshaded in the Elemental Masters series. Peter Scott and Peter Almsley share the first name, Water Mastery, and temperament, and they're thick as thieves, jokingly referring to each other as "twins" because of the shared name and mastery.
• Encyclopedia Brown: A few examples have been two Billies (Billy Turner and Billy Haggerty), two Spikes (Spike Browning and Spike Larsen), and two Carls (Carl Benton and Carl Higgensbottom).
• In Lawrence Watt-Evans's Ethshar series, there's a closed set of personal names used by Ethsharites, some of which are much more popular than others. So unrelated minor characters with the same name appear in different books, sometimes in the same book. "Kelder" is by far the most common man's name, and there are many minor characters with this name; there are also multiple characters named Kirsha, Felder, Alris, Isia, and so forth. Most people have a cognomen in addition to their name, a profession, the name of one of their parents, the place they're from, or some prominent trait.
• Faction Paradox features two characters with the unlikely name of Sabbath; Agent Sabbath Dei from the Eighth Doctor Adventures and Godfather Sabbath of the Faction itself. Unfortunately, since both characters are enigmatic, and Faction Paradox is such a Mind Screw, readers weren't entirely sure they weren't meant to be the same character in different time periods. But Word of God is they were entirely seperate, and Lawrence Miles wanted to "play on the convention that people in the same series never coincidentally have the same name."
• Five on Finniston Farm has a set of twins both called "Harry", even though they aren't even the same gender, and neither is actually called Harry. "Henry" just prefers the name "Harry", while "Harriet" goes by "Harry" for short.
• In Fate/strange Fake, there is a character named Ayaka Sayjou. Some characters assume she is the same Ayaka from Fate/Prototype, but she turns out to be a Muggle who happens to share Prototype Ayaka's name and face (though Prototype Ayaka is a brunette and this Ayaka is a blonde).
• In one Fear Street book, one of the main characters, Amy, is playing beach volleyball with a group of strangers and discovers one of them is named Amy. They make a quick joke about it, but the second Amy disappears and has no actual relevance to the plot.
  • In The Ghosts Of Fear Street book The Ooze, the protagonist is named Al(bert), and has a friend named Alix. The two like to jokily address each other as "Al."
• One of the main characters in Stephen King's Finders Keepers is Pete Saubers, while Bill Hodges' former police partner Pete Huntley also appears in this and the other two books in the trilogy.
  • In Holly, Pete Huntley shares his first name with a minor character named Pete Steinman.
• The Four Johns: Shortly before her disappearance, Mary had mentioned she was going to meet "John". Unfortunately for investigators, she has four close acquaintances named John.
• An odd aversion in ghostgirl: Petula's Girl Posse comprises Wendy Thomas and Wendy Anderson. However, they're basically the same person.
• In Girl, Interrupted, a new patient with the name Lisa arrives on the ward. Lisa Rowe becomes competitive with this girl, and makes sure that she is known simply as Lisa, while the new girl is known as Lisa Cody.
• In Girls Kingdom the protagonist is named Misaki and a minor character working at an on-campus restaurant is names Mizuki. There's no confusion caused by the names, probably because they rarely move in the same circles. There's also a pair of twins named Ayaka and Ayaka, though spelled with different kanji. Since they're always together, they're always dealt with as a pair.
• Invoked in The Giver. In the Community, only one person is allowed to carry a given first name at any given time. In the rare event that a person dies unexpectedly, their name is immediately passed on to a newborn baby to create the impression that they never really left.
• Goblins in the Castle: Subverted in Goblins on the Prowl — when she and the others are read the story of "The Foolish Giant", Fauna thinks it's nice that the giant's only friend, a boy named Will Smith, has the same first name as her friend William. The subversion is later justified with the reveal that Will Smith is William's ancestor, and the name was passed along to each son in turn.
• Averted by Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, where there is an entire sinister organisation of men named Jack.
• A minor example shows up in Great Expectations. There is Georgiana, as in Pip's mother who he calls "Also Georgiana" early on, and a different Georgiana in the Pocket family. Of course, neither of them have much of an important role, so it's easily overlooked.
• The shared universe of Simon R. Green's Urban Fantasy series has included at least four women called Penny, whether as their actual name (Penny Belcourt from the Ishmael Jones mysteries and Penny Drood from the Secret Histories) or their street name (Bad Penny and Penny Dreadful from Nightside). Opportunities for confusing them are scarce, partly because they're from three different series but mostly because all but Ms. Belcourt come to a sticky end.
• Averted in Grent's Fall by Abel Hopton and Duke Abel Marnhull.
• In Evelyn Waugh's A Handful Of Dust, one of the main characters is a married woman named Brenda with a young son named John, who begins carrying on an affair with a man who is also named John. About halfway through, Brenda learns that "John" has died in an accident. She's too stunned to grieve until further questions reveal that it's her son, not her lover, at which point she says "oh thank God" and bursts into tears of relief.
• Harry Potter
  • The books mostly follow the trope, but an exception is that Tom Marvolo Riddle shares most of his name with his father (Tom Riddle) and Tom the barman at the Leaky Cauldron. When Dumbledore tells him he should have no trouble remembering the barman's name because it's the same as his, he gets angry because he doesn't like having such a common name.
    • Interestingly in the movie, the barman and the owner of the Leaky Cauldron appear to be two different people, but are both named "Tom".
  • In Order of the Phoenix Harry mentions a ten-year-old living in his neighborhood named Mark Evans. Later in the story we find out that his mother's maiden name was Evans. There's no indication that Mark is a relative and he's never mentioned again, but the name (as well as the author's hallmark of having an apparently minor detail turn out to be significant) led to Wild Mass Guessing about a possible connection. Eventually, Word of God confessed that the boy wasn't even meant to be a Red Herring; she just used the same fairly-common surname twice without thinking.
    • Funnily enough, the Traditional Chinese translation (printed in Taiwan) preserves the Limit by transliterating the plot-relevant Evans family's surname (伊凡, Yīfán in Mandarin pinyin) and Mark Evans' surname (伊萬斯, Yīwànsī in Mandarin pinyin) differently.
  • In addition, there are two minor characters named Augustus (a Death Eater and a junior Healer). There's also Augusta Longbottom, Neville's grandmother.
  • Voldemort's father and grandfather were both named Thomas Riddle. This caused some readers to be confused by the description of Voldemort's murder of the two of them and his grandmother in Goblet of Fire. The film producers were also apparently confused; an early promotional picture of the Riddles' gravestone gave the husband's full name as Tom Marvolo Riddle, which was Voldemort's name, not his father's.
  • In the same book, two central characters (Bartemius Crouch Senior and Junior) have the same name, but one of them is using an alias, causing the Marauder's Map to mislead Harry. Justified because, as with Voldemort, they're a father and son.
  • There are also two minor characters named Ernie — one drives the Knight Bus, the other is a Hufflepuff in Harry's year. The former is specifically named after Rowling's grandfather. There's also Hepzibah Smith, one of Riddle's victims who boasts of being directly descended from Helga Hufflepuff, and Zacharias Smith, an arrogant Hufflepuff himself. Some fans have speculated that they're related in some way.
  • There's also Frank Bryce (gardener of the Riddle Family in Goblet of Fire) and Frank Longbottom, Neville's father. To drive it even further the Norwegian translation gives George Weasley the name "Frank Wiltersen".
  • There are several characters with variants of the name Percival across the franchise. Percy Weasley's name is a nickname of it but it's implied later on that his first name is Percy not Percival like Voldemort's name is Tom and not Thomas. It was Dumbledore's father's name and one of his middle names. In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the head of the American Auror office is named Percival Graves.
  • Apparently the name Cassandra is a common one for Seers; we hear of Sybill Trelawney's great great-grandmother Cassandra Trelawney as well as the author of Unfogging the Future, Cassandra Vablatsky.
  • Of course, we have the Potter family itself. Harry's parents are named James and Lily Potter. Harry names his oldest son and his only daughter after his parents; making their names....James and Lily Potter!!
    • Harry is also revealed to have an ancestor named Henry Potter, who used to be called "Harry" by his closest friends. Harry's middle name is also James, like his father.
    • Likewise, Word of God says that Percy named his older daughter Molly, after his mother, and George named his son Fred, after his twin. Thus we have three James Potters, two Lily Potters, two Molly Weasleys and two Fred Weasleys.
  • The two Lily Potters share a name with Lily Moon, a minor student in Harry's year. She's only mentioned in passing, though, and her first name is only known from supplementary material.
  • The official Black Family Tree shows some names repeating. In particular, Harry's godfather would have actually been Sirius Black III, sharing a name with his great-grandfather and great-great-uncle.
  • There are about four or five one-mention characters named Barnabus.
  • "Igor Karkaroff" becomes "Igor Irkoroff" in the Finnish translation, and the translator has stated that this was due to the rule not to use even similar-sounding names for characters. This is because the translation had previously changed "Snape" to "Kalkaros".^note The logic being that "Snape" sounds like "snake" and the Finnish version should sound like it too, with "Kalkaros" resembling the word for "rattlesnake"... the Finnish translation has a lot of far-fetched changes like that, the most extreme perhaps being "Trelawney" being "translated" punnily based on the Finnish words for "tree" and "lawn".
• The Sherlock Holmes novel Sherlock Holmes And The Titanic Tragedy by William Seil, which features Holmes and Watson travelling on the RMS Titanic, invokes this when one of their fellow passengers is Colonel James Moriarty, the brother of Professor Moriarty; Holmes notes that there are three Moriarty brothers whose parents gave them all the same Christian name of 'James', musing that it reflects a lack of imagination on the part of their parents to the point where he has wondered how the Professor turned out so brilliant. (In the original stories, Colonel James Moriarty is named in "The Final Problem" and Professor Moriarty doesn't get his first name until "The Empty House", so it's possible Doyle forgot he'd used it for the colonel. The third brother [a station-master mentioned in The Valley of Fear] doesn't have a Christian name mentioned in canon, but with the pattern set, fanon quickly settled on the idea they were all named James.)
• In A Harvest of War the main protagonist and antagonist are both called Rhona. They're still pretty easy to tell apart.
• Averted in the Shane Schofield book Hell Island, in which a random scientist is named Shane M. Hogan, and two of the protagonists are called Shane M. Schofield and Harold Hogan. Oddly enough, nobody mentions the similarities in the names and the scientist never actually turns up.
• Typically in Heralds of Valdemar recurring names are a sign of Reincarnation, as when humans undergo an Angelic Transformation and are born as Companions they retain very similar names to the ones they had in life. But it's not always the case. Pol, the Mage Wars era mercenary chosen by Need and Pol, the mentor to Lavan Firestorm, are quite unlikely to be the same soul.
  • Firesong is a minor character in The Last Herald Mage, part of clan k'Treva. Seven hundred years later, another Firesong from the same clan is a very prominent character in multiple trilogies. While this Firesong can trace his lineage back to one of the older Firesong's contemporaries, he likely doesn't know she existed; she wasn't a mage, and the clans tend to be Super Supremacists.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy plays this surprisingly straight. There seems to be only one "Arthur Phillip Dent" in the entire universe.^note To be fair, while Earth is in its prehistory. By the time non-temporally-displaced humans are being named "Arthur Phillip", Wowbagger's got all the way up to "Arthur Phillip Deodat". However, there is an "A-Rth-Urp-Hil-Ipdenu" on the fourth world of the Folfanga system.
• Hive Mind (2016):
  • Played straight in general. However, averted in two cases. The girl that Eldan kidnapped and placed in a booby trap was also named Amber. This appears to have been a deliberate attempt to provoke Amber the telepath. In addition, both Juniper's mother and Admiral Tregarth's wife are named Tressa. This is partly to indicate how common a name Tressa is; it also foreshadows Juniper becoming Admiral Tregarth's deputy and protégée.
  • This being generally played straight is foreshadowing in Candidate: When Eli meets Katelyn, readers who have read Hurricane will recognize her as Morton's strike team leader.
  • Enforced In-Universe. Teen Level corridor assignments are always made so that there are no repeated names.
• In Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson's Hoka stories, the Western-based Hokas are severely limited by the number of names in the source material. There are dozens of Lone Rangers, for instance — and that's just for males. Explaining why female Hokas are still using native names, a Hoka asked how humans managed when all the females were named "Jane".
• Averted and lampshaded in Robert Rankin's Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, due to an abundance of nursery-rhyme characters all named Jack: Jack Spratt, Little Jack Horner, Jack-be-Nimble, and Jack of "Jack and Jill". The lead character also happens to be named Jack.
• In the first book of the Hollow Kingdom Trilogy, Kate contemplates naming an orphaned baby girl "Charm", after the King's Wife Charm that protected them both. The Charm protests that they'd never know which of them was being called on, then dubs the baby Matilda instead.
• The Hunger Games: Mockingjay has an unusual exception, a pair of sisters named Leeg. Katniss refers to them as Leeg 1 and Leeg 2 to differentiate, and there is never an instance of name confusion. If the two Leegs are sisters then that's most likely their surname, making this more a case of Last-Name Basis. There is some implication they might be twins, at least fraternal ones.
• Frequently disregarded in the Icelandic Sagas. While epithets and patronymics do a good job at keeping different characters with the same name distinguishable, this requires the reader to pay close attention to these. Some examples:
  • In Grettir's Saga, Grettir's three most important human antagonists are all called Thorbjörn, and there are three more Thorbjörns as bit characters.
  • In "The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason" of Heimskringla, there is an episode where King Harald of Denmark and his accomplices Gold-Harald and Jarl Hakon conspire against King Harald of Norway. Got it?
  • In Gisli's Saga, the villain Thorgrim allies himself with a sorcerer also named Thorgrim.
• I, Claudius has so many characters with the same or very similar names that the books contain a family tree to help readers work out who's who. This is because real life Romans really hated to be imaginative with names. They tended just to reuse whatever was already in the family, and to distinguish successive generations by nicknames. And that was with sons — daughters were lucky if they've got names at all. In fact, they just had two dozen different first names for males. Making matters worse, many key women in I, Claudius have their fathers' names, such as Agrippina and Antonia. Despite being limited by real names, Graves averts the trope by using the name Agrippina only for A. the elder and calling A. the younger "Agrippinilla", a name Graves seems to have made up^note "-illa" is a Latin diminutive, but would more likely be used to form a nickname that family and close friends call you.. Claudius, in his role as the narrator, lampshades this in regards to his teacher, Marcus Porcius Cato, and carefully explains that, no, this one really is a pretty useless teacher, and not any of his four more illustrious ancestors who bore the same name. He then muses that he'll have to be very careful to keep the people with similar names apart in his own story, since he is well aware of how similar the names of people in his family are and, being a historian of some note, he knows just how confusing keeping track of people with similar names is.
• Averted in Homer's The Iliad, which features two Greek soldiers named Aias (or Ajax, depending on the translation). Aias, son of Telamon, is often referred to as Telamonian Aias, or Greater Aias, while the other is Lesser Aias. Collectively, they are referred to as the Aiantes.
• InCryptid:
  • James Garcia, a chupacabra who's Verity's dance partner, and James Smith, a friend of Antimony's, are completely different people who never interact. The first James is a pretty minor character too.
  • James Smith also shares a last name with Dave Smith, Verity's Bad Boss, though they're clearly not related, being a human and a bogeyman respectively.
  • Several minor enemies share the name "Robert": The Covenant agent Robert Bullard, and the Johrlac Robert Tapper.
  • A more unusual one is the repeated use of the name Heloise for two different Johrlac, living more than 70 years apart. The Johrlac are already a species of Inexplicably Identical Individuals, so they might just have a small pool of ancestral names (though it's more likely that their Muggle Foster Parents give them a normal name for the culture they grow up in).
  • The Ghost Roads series is in the same Verse through Canon Welding, and several secondary characters there (Tommy, Laura Moorhead) share first names with the InCryptid characters Thomas Price and Laura Campbell. Neither ever interact, though Thomas is implied to have met Rose, the protagonist of Ghost Roads.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries: Subverted — there are two murder victims both named Scotty, and both in Christmas stories.
  • "Nightmare on Elf Street" features Scotty (no last name), a Mall Santa who's stabbed in the heart.
  • Death of a Neighborhood Scrooge features Scotty Parker, a Former Child Star who's bludgeoned to death.
  • There are also two Hispanic maids named Lupe in the series. One in Death of a Trophy Wife, the other in Death of a Neighborhood Scrooge.
• Jennifer Government has two John Nikes, although one remains in a coma for most of the book. It also has a Bill NRA and a Billy NRA, and the characters mistake one for the other. Shows what you get when everyone's last name is the same as the company they work for...
• Heavily averted in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Aside from one of the two protagonists being named Jonathan, important secondary characters include John Childermass, John Segundus, John Waterbury, and John Uskglass. Fortunately, the characters are referred to by their surnames or titles most of the time. As the novel is a pastiche of Regency literature, this aversion may be inspired by Jane Austen's similar tendencies.
• In Jurassic Park, John Hammond and John Arnold share the same name—but in the movie, John Arnold became Ray Arnold.
• Averted in the Kate Shugak novels. There are multiple minor characters sharing first names (and sometimes even surnames, as the interrelated families in the pPark mean the same surnames crop up over and over). And Kate's full name is Ekaterina Shugak. She was named after her grandmother Ekaterina Shugak, who was a major character in the early novels. And Kate's goddaughter (the daughter of Bobby and Dinah) is also named Ekaterina, after Kate. She normally goes by Katya.
• The Last Woman in His Life by Ellery Queen: the victim has trouble choosing a dying message because almost any choice would sound similar to another person.
• Life of Pi boasts two unrelated characters named Satish Kumar (who were Adapted Out of the movie). This helps set them off as Pi's Opposed Mentors: one an atheist science teacher, the other an uneducated but devoutly religious shopkeeper.
• Averted in Little House on the Prairie:
  • Laura has a cousin also named "Laura Ingalls". Almanzo's older sister is also named "Laura", and was left out of the series presumably for that reason.
  • Laura has both a sister and a close friend named Mary. The latter is always referred to in the text by her full name, Mary Power, to prevent any possible confusion.
  • Laura's younger sister was named after her mother, Caroline - but is always referred to as "Carrie"; in fact, the text never indicates that her full first name is Caroline, or for that matter that Carrie is a nickname at all.
• Averted in the Jules Verne novel Master of the World. There are several characters with the first name John. The Hero is John Strock, one of his policemen is John Hart, and lastly The Dragon is John Turner. However since all of the characters are on a Last-Name Basis, it never becomes confusing which John is which. It seems as though Turner's first name is an error on either the part of Verne or one of the translators, since, in Robur the Conqueror, the novel Master of the World is a sequel to, Turner's first name is given as "Tom".
• The Maze Runner series features a few characters who have similar names:
  • One of the boys taken by Grievers in the time leading up to Group A's escape attempt is named Dave. Towards the end of The Scorch Trials, the survivors encounter a man named David.
  • George is the name of a boy who died early in the Maze Trials. (His death is shown in The Fever Code, the second of two prequels to the main trilogy.) Jorge, the name of one of the two Immunes posing as Cranks who join up with the male subjects, is the Spanish form of George.
  • Two of the boys from Group A are named Jack and Jackson. Jack is among those killed in the first of the two lightning storms which occur in The Scorch Trials. Jackson is one of the non-Immunes who were chosen as control subjects.
  • One of the boys who died in the time leading up to Thomas's arrival in the Glade was named Stephen. The Fever Code reveals that Stephen was Thomas's original name.
• Averted by Mermaid Moon. Half-Human Hybrid Sanna is looking for her human mother Lisabet, but when she asks Thyrla if she knows anyone by that name, Thyrla lists off four. It's also mentioned that there are several Eriks and Knuds.
• Dennis L. McKiernan's Mithgar series involves two male elves that are almost always mentioned together because the characters themselves go 'wait, what' and need an explanation to clarify. Vanidor and Vanidar (who, if recalled right, are neither related nor the same type of elf) are usually referred to as their translated names of "Silverbranch" and "Silverleaf" after their first introductions in each book.
• Ms. Wiz: In Time Flies with Ms Wiz when Nabila and Ms Wiz are searching for Jack in an Elizabethan village, one of the village girls remarks that there are a couple of Jacks in the village.
• An in-universe aversion of this trope, and an attempt to artifically enforce it anyway, forms the central plot of the children's book My Name Is Maria Isabel. The eponymous protagonist transfers to a new school and there are already two Marias in her new class, so the teacher gets the idea to call Maria Isabel "Mary", as she believes it would be too confusing to have three girls in the class who all go by Maria. However this ends up causing a lot of problems for Maria Isabel because, in addition to being offended on principle (due to the fact that her name has a lot of cultural and family significance), she's not used to answering to "Mary" and therefore often doesn't recognize when the teacher is talking to her. At the climax of the book, Maria Isabel is finally able to explain to the teacher what her name means to her and the difficulty that being called by an unfamiliar name has been causing her and the teacher recognizes that she was wrong and makes the change, but it still leaves one wondering why the teacher thought arbitrarily changing a student's name was a good idea in the first place.
• Part of the crux of the concept of My Name Is Will is that both protagonists are named William Shakespeare, one of them being that Shakespeare.
• Averted in A New Kind Of War by Anthony Price, where the protagonist is a new character named Frederick Fattorini, despite Frederick Clinton already being an established character in the series and specifically a major character in this novel. There's a running gag during the first half of the novel about people trying to give the new guy a nickname so there won't be two Freds on the team. On the meta level it's probably symbolic, because Frederick Clinton is the only one of the recurring cast never to get a novel directly told from his point of view (he's The Spymaster and the inside of his head is probably not an entertaining place to spend 300 pages), but this is the novel that comes closest.
• Next by Michael Crichton has two ten-year-old boys named Jamie. You could hardly blame the bad guys when they snatched the wrong kid.
• Averted in The Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks. The first book, The Way of Shadows, has fairly important characters named Aleine (the king), Elene (the love interest), and Ilena (one of the hero's foster sisters). There's also a pair of (apparently unconnected) villains named Roth and Garoth, but Roth is Garoth's son and was probably named after him. Roth is working on his own to earn his place as Garoth's son.
• Nightside: The Unnatural Inquirer introduces reporter Bettie Devine, who visits Stangefellows where regular supporting character Betty Coltrane works.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude is the king of averting this. Having in total 22 Aurelianos, 5 Arcadios... You know what? Better just check the family tree. Even worse, they're not throwaway characters— all of the (many) main characters share the same handful of names.
• The Outsiders has two similarly nicknamed main characters: "Darry" (Darren) and "Dally" (Dallas).
• The Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Heroes of Olympus, The Kane Chronicles, and the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series by Rick Riordan (they are all set in the same continuity):
  • There're three Michaels: Yew (the head of Apollo's cabin until his death in The Last Olympian), Varus (the previous praetor who died in Alaska), and Kahale (the centurion of the First Cohort). Not to mention Michel Desjardins, the French Jerk leader of the House of Life from The Kane Chronicles.
  • Though it'd be very hard to confuse, Midas mentions his daughter being named Zoe (not to be confused with Zoë Nightshade).
  • There's also a Jason at Camp Half-Blood playing Capture the Flag in The Titan's Curse, and our one and only Jason Grace.
  • Apparently, Hades has a thing for women named Maria or its variations. His known lovers include Maria di Angelo (Nico and Bianca's mom) and Marie Levesque (Hazel's mom). Both of them are dead too.
  • There's William Dare (Rachel's father) and Will Solace (the newest leader of Apollo's cabin).
  • In The Kane Chronicles, there's Julius Kane (Carter and Sadie's dad) and Julian (one of the newbies of Brooklyn House). In the Greek series, there's Julian Ramírez-Arellano (Reyna and Hylla's papa).
  • This is actually Played for Laughs in The Lightning Thief. Percy confuses Charon (the ferryman) with Chiron (the centaur). Unlucky him.
• Agatha Christie's Peril at End House averted this; it turns on Magdala "Nick" Buckley and Magdala "Maggie" Buckley.
• In his autobiography Persons and Places, George Santayana is careful to use descriptions or nicknames to distinguish the many members of his large extended family with the same or similar names, specifically noting this about his five relatives called Susie Sturgis.
• Averted in Marta Perry's series of Amish romances, Pleasant Valley. Many characters share names, which are often from the Bible, such as Daniel or Rachel or Anna. Justified in that the Amish often use their family, friends, or the Bible as a name source.
• In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Regained, when Malagigi speaks sadly of having been betrayed by Theophrastus, he quickly adds that it's not their brother but another man of the same name.
• In The Queens Own Fool there are five Marys: the eponymous Mary of Scotland and her four maids-in-waiting. The narrator keeps track of them in her mind by calling them Pious Mary, Pretty Mary, Regal Mary and Jolly Mary.
• The Queen's Thief:
  • In The Thief, the magus points out that the titular Boxed Crook's full name is Eugenides, the same as the Eddisian King's Thief. Gen angrily says that they're both named after the Trickster God. At the end, Gen turns out to have been the King's Thief all along.
  • A Conspiracy of Kings has two minor characters named Ion. The fact is slightly lampshaded by the subliminal reaction this produces in Costis.
• The Quorum by Kim Newman revolves around a quartet of schoolfriends, two of whom are named Michael. The second one to join the group is immediately dubbed "Mickey" by his new friends to avoid confusion.
• In the Rainbow Magic series, fairy names are never used twice.
• From Rain of the Ghosts:
  "Oh, Miranda Guerrero, this is Marina Cortez. Marina, Miranda. Miranda, Marina."
  Sebastian scowled. "That shouldn't get confusing at all."
  • The same book mentions in passing that two boys named Connor Kelty and Conner Ellison are hanging out together.
• Ramona Quimby: In Ramona the Pest, two of Ramona's kindergarten classmates are both named Eric.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Pete Reston is a main cast member, but there's also a recurring underclassman named Peter Cornish starting in volume 4, who is part another circle of friends with Teresa Carste, Dean Travers, and Rita Appleton.
• The Reynard Cycle: There is only one character, Celia Corvino, who shares a name with another person in the series, and that character is her grandmother, whom we never even meet.
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms, being a novel about historical characters, can be pretty bad with this, with many major characters having similar-sounding or almost identical names. See the Chinese Real Life example below. It's also not helped by the fact that since the period when the novel is set, a lot of Chinese words (and by extension names) that were originally at least somewhat different have coalesced into homophones. The day-to-day language has compensated by creating a lot of new compound words to avoid this ambiguity; historical names, on the other hand, aren't so flexible, for obvious reasons.
• In Rose Under Fire, Rose Justice meets a girl with her same name in Ravensbruck. The trope is averted however, since the other girl is Polish and her name is pronounced Róża.
• The Safehold series by David Weber treats this interestingly. Most names have distorted spellings and sometimes pronunciations. Every once in a while there will be, for instance, two Erics, but they're distorted differently (Erek and Erayk). Averted straight up in the case of Hektor: There's Prince Hektor who ruled Corisande, his son Crown Prince Hektor, and Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk, Duke of Darcos, who ended up marrying Princess Irys, the daughter of the elder Prince Hektor. Then Irys and Hektor have a son named Hektor Merlin.
• The Saxon Stories has many aversions to this, thanks to the repetitive naming conventions of the time, but probably the most interesting example is that of Uhtred's servant (and later lieutenant) Sihtric, and his enemy (and later son-in-law) Sigtryggr — Bernard Cornwell mentions in his author's notes that they're actually the same name; he's just using the two different (and equally correct) spellings to help the readers tell the difference. The TV adaptation gives them slightly different pronunciation.
• An aversion sets the plot of Scoop in motion, when nature columnist William Boot is mistaken for aspiring foreign correspondent John Courteney Boot, and so finds himself unwillingly covering a civil war in Bulungi.
• The novel Searching For Sky invokes this trope. Sky has lived on an island with three other people all her life; when she's brought to mainland California she tries to find her friend. She's upset and confused when she learns that there is more than one person called Lucas.
• Averted by The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, which has a Nicholas (the title character) and a Niccolò, as well as a Billy and a William. The similar names could not really have been avoided, though, except by choosing different historical figures.
• Averted in Semiosis: The plot follows the first seven generations of a space colony, during which time several colonists become namesakes for children of later generations.
• Very much averted in The Shadowhunter Chronicles, due to the multiple series that span more then 200 years with a large cast and a lot of Dead Guy Junior.
  • The most common name is definitely Jonathan. The very first Shadowhunter was named Jonathan, so a lot of Shadowhunters name their child after him. The first one is Jace Wayland, one of the main characters of The Mortal Instruments, whose name is short for Jonathan. Although it later turns out that Jace is not actually Jonathan Wayland and that the real Jonathan Wayland is dead. The second one is Jonathan Christopher Morgenstern, Clary's older brother, who is also known as Sebastian. The third one is Jonathan Clark, a completely unrelated mundane neighbour of Jocelyn Fray whom she pretended was Clary's father. The fourth one is Jonathan "Jon" Cartwright from the Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy short stories, who is a Fantastic Racist whom Simon despised. The fifth one is Jonathan "Johnny" Rook, although it is very likely that this is actually a fake name.
  • There are three people named Max. Maryse's brother Max Trueblood is the first and her youngest son Max Lightwood (named after her brother) is the second. The third one is Max Lightwood-Bane, the adopted warlock child of Maryse's eldest son Alec, named after the second Max, after he got murdered during the war.
  • Alec's other adopted son, Rafael Lightwood-Bane shares his name with vampire Raphael Santiago.
  • Alec and Isabelle's grandfather, and Jules' (and his six siblings) father are both named Andrew.
  • Gabriel Lightwood shares his first name with the leader of the New York werewolf pack, who was murdered by Luke.
  • There are also two people named Clive: Clive Breakspear (the head of the Buenos Aires institute) and Clive Cartwright (A student at the Shadowhunter academy who bullies James). They are both complete jerks.
  • "Jace" is normally a short form of Jason, though, in-universe, he got the name because his adoptive mother likes the nickname over Jonathan, and the nickname stuck. There's a mook called Jason in City of Heavenly Fire who gets turned into a Dark Shadowhunter.
  • Emma Bayliss is the name of a deceased mundane girl whom Tessa is forced to Change into so she could access her memories. Emma Carstairs, meanwhile, is the little Shadowhunter who gets Break The Cutie'd in a span of a single night in City of Heavenly Fire and who stars in The Dark Artifices.
  • There are two people named Cordelia Carstairs: the protagonist of The Last Hours and Emma's mother. Although Carstairs is only the name of Emma's mother by marriage. Her maiden name is Townsend.
  • Granville Fairchild (Charlotte's father) and Granville Fairchild II (Jocelyn's father).
  • Tessa and Will's son is named James, a sort of a Dead Guy Junior in honour of their friend, James "Jem" Carstairs, even though the latter is not dead yet.
  • There are two people named Alexander Lightwood. The younger brother of Anna and Cristopher Lightwood from The Last Hours and Alexander "Alec" Lightwood from The Mortal Instruments who is actually descended from Christopher.
  • Speaking of Christopher: There are also two of those. The first is the aforementioned Christopher Lightwood. The second is Cristopher "Kit" Rook/Herondale from The Dark Artifices.
  • Thomas Lightwood is named after the late Thomas Tanner, who was a good friend of his mother Sophie.
  • You also have Jules Montclair (Céline's father) and Julian "Jules" Blackthorn.
  • William "Will" Herondale is named after his grandfather, William Herondale.
  • Similarly, Barbara Lightwood was named after her grandmother Barbara Lightwood (née Pangborn)
  • There's also some people with similar sounding names like Jonah Carstairs (Jem's father) and John Carstairs (Emma's father) and Catarina Loss (Magnus' fellow warlock and friend), Katerina (the Blackthorns' teacher who gets turned into a Dark Shadowhunter) and Catherine Ashdown (who escorted Jace to New York in Ghosts Of The Shadowmarket.
• Mildly averted in Ranger's Apprentice. A significant part of the novels is that Will doesn't have a surname, as his parents' identities are unknown. When he graduates and becomes a Ranger, there are other Rangers already named Will, so he's given the last name Treaty to distinguish him from them.
• In Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence, there are several different guys named Ali. This is not implausible, as it's a fairly common male name in Muslim countries, but potentially confusing for Lawrence of Arabia fans curious about the inspiration for Omar Sharif's character. (Sherif Ali was a Composite Character.)
• An interesting use of this trope comes from Cory Doctorow's novel Someone Comes To Town Someone Leaves Town, in which the main character and his siblings each have a unique starting letter, but may be referred to by any name starting with that letter. All other characters have unique and consistent names, none of which share starting letters with the siblings. It works surprisingly well, and you may not even notice the oddity until halfway through the book.
• Similar and identical names crop up repeatedly throughout A Song of Ice and Fire, which was done intentionally on the part of the author to mimic Real Life.
  • The royal Targaryen line repeats names much like real royals. Most of the names tend to incorporate the same syllables too, which can make reading the family tree of the house rather confusing. For example, the tree includes people named Rhaenys, Rhaena, Rhaenyra, Rhaegar, Rhaelle, and Rhaella, and people named Viserys, Viserra, and Visenya. To date, there have been five kings named Aegon, and two kings named Jaehaerys, Viserys, Daeron, and Aerys each. Daenerys is the third Targaryen to bear that name; the first Daenerys was the eldest daughter of Jaehaerys I who died young, while the second Daenerys was a daughter of Aegon IV who married a Prince of Dorne and became ancestor to current Martells. She is, however, the first to contest the Iron Throne as queen regnant, hence why she is still titled the First of Her Name.
    • When Maester Aemon recounts to Jon Snow his place in the Targaryen family, he mentions that Daeron II was succeeded by his son Aerys, and Jon immediately thinks of the Mad King. Only for Aemon to correct him that he meant Aerys I, his father Maekar I's older brother — his uncle in other words. (Aerys II was Aemon's great nephew.)
    • Brown Ben Plumm tries to charm Dany by saying that he is descended from a certain King Aegon Targaryen, only to end up befuddling her since there have been five King Aegons in history. Supplementary materials clarify that Ben is descended from Aegon III, whose youngest daughter married into House Plumm.
  • Noble families often name their children in honor of relatives (e.g., most historical Starks mentioned are named "Brandon the X"), allies (e.g., Robb Stark and Robert Arryn were both named after Robert Baratheon), or liege lords . Some noble houses have common naming traditions, creating a number of relatives with similar names. For example, many Lannister names begin with Ty-, and many Greyjoy names end with -on. All noble bastards from the same geographic region are given the same ersatz surname referencing the region's terrain, such as Snow or Sand. There are also a lot of Jeynes, and a truly ridiculous number of characters, major and minor, named Jon. In fact, if we include variations of the same name (e.g. Ned and Edd), just about a third of the male Westerosi population appears to be named either Ed, Ben, Brandon, or Jon.
  • Peasant names are even less diverse, and are usually limited to a handful of traditional lowborn names such as "Pate" (taken from Spotted Pate, a folk hero) and "Tansy".
  • It's worth noting that the culture of Westeros makes heavy use of nicknames to help distinguish between people, which is particular necessary with House Frey, where Walder Frey (over 90 and on his eighth wife) has literally hundreds of descendants, a great many of whom are named Walder or Walda in order to suck up to him. Being able to pick between Black Walder and Bastard Walder among others is much appreciated, as are the extensive family listings in the rear of the books.
  • Daenerys seems to be determined to name a "child" of hers some variation of her late brother's name, Rhaegar: she names her unborn baby Rhaego, and later names her dragons after the three dead men in her life: Rhaegal, Viserion and Drogon, after Rhaegar, Viserys and Drogo.
  • In the third book, Robb mentions that marrying Jeyne Westerling will not make her the first Queen Jeyne Westerling in history, as there was a precedent over two hundred years ago. Unfortunately, she happened to be the consort of Maegor I Targaryen, who died after being betrayed by people sworn to serve him, foreshadowing Robb's fate.
  • This is Played for Laughs in the prequel story "The Sworn Sword", where Dunk and Bennis the Brown are recruiting peasants to fight the lady of a nearby castle. Two out of the eight deemed able to fight were named Will, and three were named Wat. Two of the Wats were brothers. This was solved when it turned out the two Wills and the Wat-brothers and the lone Wat came from different villages, and they were given surnames based on the vegetables grown by their village. The remaining problem was the two brothers, but it turned out the younger had once fallen into the village well. He was from then on known as Wet Wat.
  • The World of Ice & Fire mentions House Durrandon, which had a tradition of naming the heir to the throne after the line's founder, Durran Godsgrief. The section discussing them frequently includes brackets for which King Durran scholars think did a certain thing. In the case of historical Brandon Starks, they don't even try.
  • Old Nan has been a staple in Winterfell for decades, caring for numerous generations of Starks, whose penchant for naming their children "Brandon" means that in her senility, every single Brandon has morphed into a hazy single figure from her perspective. According to Bran, he has mistaken several times for his late uncle Brandon, or even another, unspecified, long-dead Brandon Stark.
  • The aversion extends to a few animal names. While her siblings name their direwolves after English words, Arya names hers after Nymeria of the Rhoynar, who led her people to settle Dorne. Much later, we are introduced to Nymeria Sand, one of Oberyn Martell's bastards, and we learn that all Martells have the middle name "Nymeros" in honor of their ancestor, Nymeria of the Rhoynar. Meanwhile, Balerion, the dragon ridden by Aegon I, became the namesake of a black cat who roams the Red Keep, formerly owned by Dany's niece, Rhaenys.
  • When the books were adapted into a TV series, the creators seem to be enforcing the one Steve limit for their adaptation, at least for characters who appear alive in the story (there are two Jons, but one is a Posthumous Character). Robert Arryn is renamed Robin ^note which originates from his nickname in the books, "Sweetrobin" to avoid confusion. Similarly, Theon's sister Asha is renamed Yara because her original name is too close to Osha, the Wildling woman captured by the Starks.
• In the Star Trek EU, there are at least four Vulcans named Solok (the canon captain from Deep Space Nine; an official in the Shatnerverse; a scientist for whom a science vessel is named; and a security officer in the Mirror Universe, who doesn't appear to be a version of any of the above). Maybe "Solok" is the Vulcan equivalent of "John"? To make matters even more confusing, the canon universe also has a Ferengi Solok and a Romulan Solok, the latter of whom is female.
  • The Star Trek Novel 'Verse averts this several times. Cardassian characters are particularly notable for sharing names - a character in ''The Never-Ending Sacrifice'' has the same first name as one of Gul Dukat's sons (Mikor). In the same book, a minor supporting character (Martus Lok) shares a family name with an established major character (Pythas Lok) but is likely not a relative. In Starfleet Corps of Engineers, there's also Winn Mara, a minor supporting character and a Bajoran. She shares one of her names with Kai Winn Adami from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but there's no evidence they're related. Word of God has more or less confirmed the name "Winn" was chosen to deliberately subvert the One Steve Limit rule. Finally, two unrelated Tellarites with the name Teg have appeared in novels by David Mack, the first in A Time to Heal, the second in The Persistence of Memory.
  • In the prologue to Star Trek: The Lost Years, set during the Vulcan Sundering, an old-school Vulcan mocks the Alphabetical Theme Naming of the followers of Surak by saying that eventually the whole movement would collapse into confusion when they ran out of names.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The last name of the Rebel pilot in A New Hope, the one who was force-garroted by Vader, was Antilles. Wedge, a fighter pilot beloved by the EU, also has the last name Antilles, and isn't related — in one book he meets his new quartermaster, a droid who was on the Tantive IV, who tells him that it's pleased to serve under another Antilles and hopes things will end better this time, to Wedge's discomfort. It's mentioned that this is a common last name — in the comics, a short-lived Jedi character who is of the philosophy that Jedi should own nothing, not even their names, goes by Jon Antilles, and it's mentioned that no one thinks that's what he was born as.
  • In Episode I, the senator from Alderaan is Bail Antilles, and his successor, better known as Leia's adoptive father, is Bail Organa.
  • Mace Towani from Caravan Of Courage and Mace Windu from the prequels.
  • Anakin Skywalker and Anakin Solo. Although the latter is named directly for the former, his grandfather.
  • "Mala" or "Malla" is the short form of Chewbacca's wife's name, the name of Wedge's doomed girlfriend from just before he joined the Rebel Alliance, and the name of a bounty hunter who amused the Emperor with her audacity.
  • In Coruscant Nights, Haninum Tyk Rhinann is tasked with tracking down Jedi Knight Jax Pavan, only to find that there are 582,797,754 Jax Pavans in the galaxy, and 8,674 in Coruscant's Yaam Sector where the man he's looking for lives.
• The Stormlight Archive:
  • Lampshaded by Lopen who is, as far as anyone can tell, the only person with that name in the entire world. Because of that, he often refers to himself as the Lopen.
  • Rock's name in his native language is actually a short poem about a stone his father found the day he was born. He simply translate's it to "Rock" for the convenience of his friends who don't speak his language. Of course when his family are introduced he says one of his sons is also named Rock, but it's a "different kind of rock". Similarly both his Wife and one of his daughters are named "Song", although different songs.
  • The Heralds, being Mythological figures, are the inspiration for a number of characters names. Of course since they are honored religious figures, the names are never exactly duplicated. Shallan's name is specifically noted as being based on the Herald Shalash.
  • All Cryptics apparently want to use "Pattern" for their human name (their real names are apparently long sequences of numbers). Shallan's Pattern, as the first to make a bonding, gets to keep the name, while the rest are required to pick other names (Motif, Design, Ornament, etc) so that the humans can tell who they are talking about.
• Another example from L. M. Montgomery's books comes from The Story Girl and The Golden Road, in which the main character and one of her friends are both called Sara. There is no confusion between the two, as the former is usually known as "The Story Girl" by her peers, and the latter is usually called by her full name, i.e. Sara Ray.
• Sinbad the Sailor begins with a landsman named Sinbad meeting the titular character with whom he shares a name. A fact Sinbad the Sailor immediately remarks upon.
• The Storm Swimmer has three girls named Olivia who all hang out with Scarlett. Ginika thinks of them as the smiley Olivia, the starey Olivia, and the fidgety Olivia. Nearly everyone calls them 'the Olivias', even though the starey Olivia protests that they're separate people.
• Lampshaded in Carl Hiaasen's Striptease where two strippers want to use the name stage name of "Monique". They settle on the older one keeping the name while the younger one calls herself "Monique Jr."
• Steven Pinker discusses names in a chapter of The Stuff of Thought. He opens the chapter talking about the commonness of his own name, joking about the prominence of smart successful people named Steve - Stephen Hawking, Stephen J. Gould, Stephen King, Steven Rose, Steve Jobs, the two authors of Freakonomics, and even includes a cartoon someone drew of a guy looking at a previous Pinker book and buying it deciding "If he's called Steve, he must know what he's talking about!" as he is surrounded by a bookshelf full of many of the aforementioned Steve authors.
• In Sword of Truth, there are three Saras (including one doll), and two Drefans. However, only one of each group truly has a major role.
• The Testament Of Gideon Mack by James Robertson has two characters called John — Gless and Moffat.
• Subverted by Ira Levin in This Perfect Day. The novel takes place in a dystopia in which all men share the same four names (Jesus, Bob, Karl, and Li) and all women a different set of four names (Mary, Yin, Anna, and Peace), with individuals differentiated by numbers following their names. Members of a small rebel group refer to themselves and others in the group by unique names such as Leopard and Lilac.
• In one of the Thursday Next books, this trope comes up, and it is revealed that one of Hemingway's last novels was never written because he insisted all the characters had the same name. In Thursday's world, since literature is so popular, many people have changed their names to famous authors. New laws were passed forcing a number suffix (normally in subscript) on each name (like: Francis Bacon₁₂₃₁), after a court case where the judge, defendant, and the whole jury had changed their names to Christopher Marlowe.
• The setting of Time to Orbit: Unknown features the Public Universal Friend subculture, who have given up their names, identities, and personal pronouns in order to devote themselves to the service of humanity. It is therefore inappropriate to refer to them by any name, only as "the Friend", which makes things mildly awkward as soon as there's more than one of them present in the small cast. The other characters are generally forced to resort to things like "the Friend who is a doctor" and "the newer Friend" in order to differentiate.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • Across the franchise there are two Hador, three Ecthelion, three Beren, two Boromir, two Denethor, six Durin, and two or three Barahir. The Dwarves believe each Durin is a reincarnation of the original Durin, one of the first seven Dwarves, so that naming convention makes sense. It also means there should be six other Dwarf leaders somewhere with a similar history.
  • There might also have been two Glorfindels, depending on your interpretation. In early drafts, Glorfindel of Gondolin and the Glorfindel who dwelt in Rivendell thousands of years later were not the same Elf, but Tolkien later decided that, possibly alone among Elves, Glorfindel not only reincarnated after his death but later returned to Middle-earth from Valinor.
  • In the first version of The Fall of Gondolin is an Elf named Legolas, who is of the House of the Tree and is especially keen-sighted, even for Elves. Unlike Glorfindel, there's no chance this is the same Legolas as in The Lord of the Rings, because they are of different kindreds; Noldor (High Elves) and Sindar (Grey Elves) respectively. It's likely that, had the revisions to The Fall of Gondolin been completed before Tolkien's death, the Legolas in that story would have been renamed.
  • The Lord of the Rings:
    • Sam names his first three sons Frodo, Merry, and Pippin respectively. He also had a son named Bilbo.
    • Bill the pony, whom the hobbits purchased from Bill Ferny. Apparently, Sam wasn't good at coming up with creative names.
    • Of the three female major characters, two are named Arwen and Éowyn. Yes, really. And Éowyn has a brother named Éomer.
  • Also, from The Silmarillion, there's Míriel Serindë (Finwë's wife) and Míriel Ar-Zimraphel (last Queen of Númenor). They were separated by several thousand years, though.
  • Note though that no two of the same name are alive at the same time, except Merry, Pippin, and some of the Durins (which may be primarily a regnal title, anyway).
  • Casual fans (or non-fans who have seen the films) sometimes confuse Sauron and Saruman, who besides having similar names are remarkably similar in character (being the Big Bad and one-time The Dragon of the book). For this reason the 1978 film adaptation referred to Saruman as "Aruman" — but inconsistently, which probably just caused even more confusion.
  • In general, the Legendarium is loaded down with aversions of this trope, especially if you dig into The Silmarillion and the Appendices. This is probably because a lot of Tolkien's names were in his invented languages, whose vocabularies were somewhat limited. So you end up with heaps of names that are both unfamiliar to the modern ear, and sound very similar to each other; a lot of first-time readers struggle with this.
  • The Finnish translation changes Barliman Butterbur's name to Viljami Voivalvatti, resulting in him having the same first name as William the troll.
• An interesting aversion occurs in The Tommyknockers. Two characters, Jim Gardener and Bobby Tremain, are having a conversation where main character Bobbi Anderson is mentioned. The audience knows that we're talking about Bobbi and not Bobby, due to the spelling, but Bobby himself thinks he's being referred to in the third person and says "I'm right here."
• Dr. Seuss averted this rule pretty hard in his story Too Many Daves about a mother named Mrs. McCave who named her 23 sons Dave and then regrets it, thinking she should have named each one of them something much more unusual.
• In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Sissy decides to call all her husbands and lovers "John" rather than use their real names. Her third husband, who finally asserts himself and insists on her and her sister using his real name, actually is a Steve.
• Several aversions in The Twilight Saga.
  • Bella's full name is Isabella Marie Swan. There's also Maria (the vampire who turned Jasper) and Mary (one of the American nomads). Not to mention that Alice's human name is Mary Alice Brandon.
  • Also Renée (Bella's mother) and Renata (one of the Volturi guards).
  • Charles is the name of one of the European nomads. What's the name of Bella's father? Charlie.
• There are several Toms in Uncle Tom's Cabin, most of whom are only referred to, and at least two Georges. According to the author's note at the end, this was intentional on the part of the author.
• Partial aversion: Stephen King's novel Under the Dome has an Andy (male, short for Andrew) and an Andi (female, short for Andrea).
• Averted in Vampire Academy.
  • There are two Nathans in the story. One is Nathan Ivashkov, Adrian's father. The second one is the Strigoi who awakened Dimitri.
  • There are also two Sonyas. One is Sonya Karp, a spirit user and teacher at the academy. The other is Sonya Belikova, Dimitri's younger sister.
• The Vatta's War series has two moderately important characters named Gary. One is only in the first book and the other doesn't show up until the fourth book, but it's still kind of disorienting.
• Averted in military thriller Victoria, which has multiple unrelated characters named Kelly, and at least two of them also sharing their first name, John. Lampshaded by protagonist John Rumford, who jokes that sometimes, you might think every third Marine is named Kelly.
• In the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold:
  • The Quaddies in Diplomatic Immunity have no family names but maintain uniqueness with numbers; a major character, Garnet Five, is almost never just called "Garnet" in either dialogue or narration. She says that the last time she checked, there were eight Garnets. It is mentioned that there is a quaddie named Leo Ninety-Nine, although we never meet this character.^note See Falling Free for the reason why "Leo" is such a popular name among quaddies.
  • Also averted en masse by the Vor class of Barrayar, who traditionally name firstborn sons for their grandfathers (paternal, then maternal) and secondborn sons with their grandfathers' middle names (maternal, then paternal), which makes reading Barrayaran history very confusing.
  • In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Ivan is the only Ivan that appears. However, when Tej is searching a database for him, she finds scads of Ivan Vorpatrils. She narrows it down to Ivan Xav Vorpatril, and henceforth, Ivan is always referred to as "Ivan Xav" in her point of view.
  • From the same series, Bujold had initially wanted to name a supporting character "Nile" but was told by her editor that proofreading a book about "Miles" and "Nile" would be a nightmare. Initially she had intended Miles to have a sister (probably a teenager only slightly younger than himself) of this name, but decided that there would be too much overlap between this character and Miles's best friend (and crush) Elena Bothari. Bujold later used the name Nile both as the middle name of Miles's wife, and for a much, much younger sister for Miles - implying that Miles's mother had also wanted a daughter called Nile for a long time, as much as Bujold had wanted her to have one.
  • Elena Bothari is named after her mother, Elena Visconti. After Miles realises that his unrequited crush on the younger Elena isn't going anywhere, after a few books he forms a relationship with another of the mercenary solders under his command, a woman called Elli Quinn. When Miles's brother Mark meets them, he reflects that the similarity of names is an echo of Miles's distinct preference for a type in women.
• Tolstoy's War and Peace has many characters having some variant of Peter, Andrei, Alexander, Anna or Nikolai somewhere in their names. Luckily, most editions come with a list of the major characters and their relations in the front.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In the Horus Heresy novels, Primarch Horus Lupercal shares his first name with his friend and advisor 5th Company captain Horus Aximand. It's helped by the fact that Horus Lupercal is called "The Commander" or "The Warmaster", and Horus Aximand is usually called by his last name when his friends don't call him "Little Horus".
  • The Gaunt's Ghosts books have an interesting aversion of this, as there are several minor characters named after the highly-regarded Saint Sabbat. On top of that, Sabbat herself gets reincarnated over the course of the books.
• Warrior Cats, a series with odd Animal Naming Conventions, averts this (seeing as there are over 1400 characters it would be pretty hard not to):
  • There are at least four Robinwings, two Maxs, two Minnowkit's three Milkfurs, three Birchstars, two Frecklewishs, two Coals, two Daisy's three Darkstars, three Flowers, two Dovestars, two Hareflights, two Fritzs, two, Hawks, two Furys, two Lilys and 8 Lily- prefixes, two Mintfurs, two Mintys, three Gorseclaws and two Gorsetails (plus other Gorse- prefixes too), theres a Graywing and a Gray Wing, two Mists, two Mistlekits, two Mitzi's two Molewhiskers, two Ivytails, two Cocos, two Corrianders, two Emberdawns, two Emberkit's, two Applefurs, two Bees, two Beechfurs,two Larchkits, two Larksongs and two Larkwings, two Branchs, a Mousefur and a Mousewhisker (both in the same Cast Herd no less), as well as two Ashfurs and an Ashfoot, to name a few.
  • There is an Egg and an Eggs, who appear in two seperate books, but are very close in chronology.
  • And that's just the beginning. The name prefixes and suffixes are reused many times, so even if there aren't direct duplicates, it's still confusing. Many of the non-clan cats also have names that are used as prefixes for Clan or Tribe names. For example, the most commonly used prefix is "White" - altogether in the series, you've got Whiteberry, Whiteclaw, Whitefang, Whitestar, Whitestorm, two Whitetails and a White Tail, Whitethroat, Whitewater, White-eye and Whitewing.
  • There are 3 Clouds, two Cloudys, two Cloud with __ in Belly, and five clan cats with Cloud- as a prefix, including two Cloudberrys.
  • One Eye is a major villain in Dawn of the Clans and One-eye is a cranky Thunder Clan elder in The Prophecy's Begin and supplemental material.
  • Almost all Clan cats have "-kit" as a suffix as a kitten and "-paw" as a suffix as an apprentice, meaning that almost everyone shares a name with a previous character for the entirety of their childhood.
  • This eventually gets mocked in Veil of Shadows: they're discussing an impostor's identity, and Lionblaze suggests, "Tigerstar?" He meant the first Tigerstar, and there's an awkward moment between him and the current ShadowClan leader, who is also named Tigerstar, before clarifying which one he meant.
• In Louis Sachar's Wayside School series, three of the kids in Mrs. Jewls' class are named Eric Fry, Eric Bacon, and Eric Ovens. In the story which introduced them, the joke was that if at least one of the Erics possessed a quality then the rest of the kids believed that the other Eric(s) had it as well. This resulted in the thin Eric Bacon being nicknamed "Fatso", the athletic Eric Fry being nicknamed "Butterfingers", and the nice Eric Ovens being nicknamed "Crabapple".
• In The Wheel of Time, few characters have the same names but many have very similar names, leading to confusion, especially given the great number of minor characters and the great length of narration the reader must keep in mind. Jordan made one particular effort to avert this trope, with Joiya Byir, a minor villain who shared her name with the child Egwene had had in a vision of a possible future. Since the child never really existed, this is an incredibly tenuous case, except for the fact that it causes Egwene some consternation.
• Lampshaded in Who by Algis Budrys, when Lucas Martino goes off to live with his uncle Lucas Maggiore. His uncle immediately says, "Lucas and Lucas—that's too many Lucases in one store." Lucas Martino is promptly nicknamed Tedeschino, but the narration continues to use his original name.
• The Witch of Knightcharm: Averted and then enforced. Two members of an evil Wizarding School's rookie class are both named Janet. They look completely different, but one of the Janets is still ordered to go by her last name to ensure nobody confuses the two. (The protagonist figures that the person giving the orders is just being a bully, since again, the two Janets look absolutely nothing alike).
• Very much averted in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall - being set at the royal court in 16th century England, it has a large cast of which roughly half are named either Thomas, Anne, Henry or John. Frequently lampshaded.
• Famously averted in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
  • There are a mother and daughter named Catherine (the mother died in childbirth). The daughter Catherine falls in love with and marries her cousin, Linton, whose first name just happens to be her last name (his mother, her father's sister, gave her son her maiden name as his first name). She then goes on to marry her cousin Hareton Earnshaw, which makes her Catherine Earnshaw, just like her mother.
  • The tendency for gentlemen to be addressed by their surnames also means that at different times, multiple male characters are referred to as "Earnshaw" (the first Catherine Earnshaw's father, his son Hindley, and Hindley's son Hareton), or "Linton" (the second Catherine's father Edgar Linton and her cousin Linton Heathcliff), or "Heathcliff" (the book's Villain Protagonist, and his son Linton, who uses his father's Only One Name as his surname).
• Xanthippic Dialogues averts this twice - Athens have two Platos (the philosopher and the playwright) and two Ewarchs (Phryne's fiance and the one Phryne actually slept with, because she got the wrong address and no more innocence to lose, and he was cute). The Platos are routinely mixed up, too.
• Averted in Sandokan. Tremal Naik named his daughter Darma after his tiger, and they both appeared in The Two Tigers and The King of the Sea before the tiger got shot.
• Lampshaded in The Accursed Kings, where just about male character of the French court is named Philippe, Charles, or Louis, and to ensure you know which character is doing what, they mostly stick to titles and geographical locations (e.g. Philippe V is the count of Poitiers before he becomes king). The main exception is Robert of Artois, and even he's Robert III (named after his great-grandfather).

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