A phonetic goblin is a word that sounds like a real word gone wrong. The good ones share traits: heavy consonant onsets (thr-, squ-, spl-), back vowels, chunky endings (-nd, -lch), and obvious pronunciation.

Each name is a stem plus a suffix. Stems come from weighted phoneme pools or a pool of real chunky words (crud, grist, gourd); suffixes are grouped into families that each fake a different etymology — Latinate/medical (-uloid, sounds like a doctor named it), medieval (-mond, sounds like a man who held land in 1183), diminutive, and mineral (-ite, sounds discovered rather than born). The comedy is the register collision: a gutter stem wearing formal morphology. Junction rules keep everything pronounceable — silent e’s drop before vowel suffixes, final consonants double the way English actually doubles them.

There’s real linguistics under the joke (phonetic improbability correlates with funniness), which is half of why I made it — the other half is that rerolling for a good one never stops being fun. Vanilla JS, no dependencies, first project I built to be public from day one.