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Some of my most successful name lists were where I gave the players a short list that had a strong, clear rule for making their own names and then let the player invent within a clear framework. These were usually names for aliens or nonhumans of some sort. So when playing murderous exiled faerie creatures, everyone had an elaborate, poetic and sociopathic sounding title, like "The Final Empress who Sent the Whisperer" and "She Who Sleeps Soundly After the Slaughter" and "The Blood Poet".

In another game, we were all aliens studying the earth, and the rule was that we would pick a shared glossary of obscure terminology for some technical field and then take a term from it for out name. Players loved looking up glossaries online until we settled on one and divvied out names from it.

So, the idea would be telling players enough to get their imaginations going and make up their own things that seem to fit a pattern. Which... I guess that's exactly like every other part of RPG design, then.