Place Name Generator
The place name generator invents names for fictional places: towns, rivers, forests, mountains, lakes, islands, deserts and valleys, in six flavors from neutral to futuristic. Choose the kind of place and a flavor, then press the button for one name or five.
Updated
How the place name generator builds a name
A name is assembled from parts. For each of the eight place types and each of the six flavors, the page holds a list of prefixes, a list of roots and a list of endings.
The generator draws a root and an ending and joins them. Half the time it also puts a prefix in front, as in “New”, “Fort” or “Crystal”; for mountains it does so four times in five.
The results are inventions, but a name can coincide with a real place by accident. Each pick is an unbiased draw from the browser's cryptographic random generator, as described in how our randomness works.
Example: how many names a neutral town can have
A neutral town draws from 11 prefixes, 8 roots such as Spring, Bridge and Haven, and 9 endings such as -ton, -ville and -port. That gives 72 names without a prefix, such as Bridgeport, and 792 with one, such as Old Havenville: 864 in all.
Endings like -ham and -ford are real elements of English place names: -ham meant a farm or homestead and -ford a river crossing, as the list of elements in British place names shows. Toponymy, the study of place names, traces where such parts come from.
The six place name flavors
- Neutral: everyday parts that would fit a present-day map.
- Fantasy, mythological: parts with a storybook sound.
- Futuristic: parts such as Neo, Nova and Prime for science fiction.
- Historical, exotic: older-sounding and far-away-sounding parts. These are stylistic labels only and do not represent a real language or period.
For towns sorted by landscape, such as coastal or desert, use the town name generator. For villages in a regional style, use the village name generator, and for the streets inside them the street name generator. A science-fiction map can take its worlds from the planet generator.
Questions about the place name generator
Are the names real places?
They are invented, but the parts are ordinary word pieces, so some results match real places. Springfield and Bridgeport both come out of the neutral town lists, and both are real US cities. Search for a name before you print it on a map or in a book.
How many names can it make?
It depends on the lists. A neutral town has 864 possible names; the smallest set, a mythological island, has 60. The five names you get with Generate 5 Names are drawn separately, so a set can contain the same name twice.
Sources
- Wikipedia: List of elements in place names in the British Isles — real place-name endings such as -ham, -ford and -bury (checked October 16, 2026)
- Wikipedia: Toponymy — the study of place names (checked October 16, 2026)