Picking a good username

I sometimes find it hard to choose a good username, whether it's for social media, gaming, or some other purpose. It's not always easy to come up with something neutral on the spot.

One tactic I have is to pick a 2-word username, and keep one of the words the same across my different accounts, and the other word can change. This makes it easy for me to keep track of my usernames as there is a cohesive "theme". The other advantage of changing the other word is that if the original one is already taken by another user, I have plenty of options available to me since I'd be changing one of the words anyway.

A good place to start, if unsure, is a username generator. Even if the generated name you like isn't available, it's a good starting point to bounce more ideas off. For gaming, I like this gamer name generator.

I think it's important to pick a username that is going to sound equally good years down the track, and not to go for the slang word of the day today. Otherwise it will sound horribly old in just a few years.