Wedding table name generator

Table names or table numbers?

Numbers win on speed and names win on charm, and the honest answer is that most guests spend eleven seconds looking at the display board and want to be sitting down. If you use names, the display must show the room layout as well, or you will have forty people wandering between Copenhagen and Marrakesh looking for Lisbon.

The compromise almost everyone lands on: names on the table cards, names and numbers on the display board, numbers only on the sheet you give the venue.

What makes a good theme?

One where a guest who does not know you can still find the table. Places you have travelled works because the names are distinct and pronounceable. In-jokes do not, because half the room cannot read them aloud to ask for directions.

The other test is whether the theme has twelve entries in it. Songs from your relationship is a lovely idea that runs out at table five and finishes with something nobody remembers choosing.

Which numbers to skip

Skipping 13 is common at Western weddings, 4 at Chinese ones, and 39 in some Afghan communities. It costs nothing and it saves one guest a small, private annoyance on a day they cannot mention it. If you skip a number, skip it — do not put an empty table there.

Where the tables themselves go, and who ends up at the one by the door, is the harder question — top table etiquette covers the part that causes actual arguments.