Village Name Generator

How the village name generator builds a name

For each of ten styles the page holds five word lists: prefixes, roots, endings, describing words and landscape words, with 10 to 12 words in each. One of five patterns is drawn for each name, for example root + ending, prefix + root, or describing word + landscape word, and the parts are drawn to fill it.

Each click gives five different names: the generator keeps drawing until it has five that are not the same. Each pick is an unbiased draw from the browser's cryptographic random generator, as described in how our randomness works.

Example: an English village name

The English style has prefixes such as North, Upper and Little, roots and endings such as -ford, -bury and -thorpe, describing words such as Kings and Market, and landscape words such as Heath and Brook. One click can give Upper Fordbury, Market Heath and Wickham.

Those parts are real elements of English place names: -ford is a river crossing, -bury a fortified enclosure and -thorpe a secondary settlement, according to the list of elements in British place names.

How close the regional styles come to real names

The regional styles imitate the sound of place names from a region using about a dozen typical word parts each. The results are inventions and often would not pass as correct in the language they imitate; a Welsh or Japanese speaker will spot that at once.

A name can also match a real place by accident. The Scottish style can join Inver, “mouth of a river”, and ness into Inverness, which is a real city.

For a larger settlement, the town name generator sorts its parts by landscape. The place name generator names the rivers and forests around a village, the street name generator its lanes, and the British name generator the people who live there.