Fantasy Town Name Generator

How real place names are made

Most old place names began as a description, not a title. Somebody needed to say which farm, which crossing or which hill, and the answer stuck. In England a name is usually two pieces of Old English: the first says what the spot was like or who held it, the second says what kind of place it was. Bradford was a broad ford, Oxford a ford for oxen. Brad is one of the openings this generator uses, alongside Ald (old), Stan (stony), Whit (white) and Cald (cold).

The second piece, the head, tells you what you are looking at. A -ton or a -ham is a farm or homestead, a -ley a clearing in woodland, a -wick often a dairy farm, a -bury a fortified place. A -chester goes back to the Latin word for a military camp and usually marks an old Roman fort, as in Winchester and Manchester. The heads here are sorted by size, so a village gets a -ley or a -wick, and a city gets a -bury, a -minster or a -chester.

Norse names and the Danelaw

In the ninth century Danish armies settled much of eastern and northern England, and the land under their law became known as the Danelaw. Their language left its own heads on the map. A -by is a farmstead or village, as in Derby, Grimsby and Whitby; a -thorpe is an outlying farm; a -toft is the plot a house stood on, as in Lowestoft. Yorkshire and Lincolnshire are thick with them, while much of the south and west kept its Old English names.

That split is handy for a fantasy map. Use the Norse culture for a coast that settlers from over the sea took, and English for the older heartland, and the border between them shows in the names without a word of explanation. The Norse parts, such as Ravn (ravens), Ulf (wolves), -vik (bay), -holm (islet) and -havn (harbour), are real Old Norse elements in simplified spellings. Some English villages mix the two languages, a Norse first half on an English -ton, and you can do the same by hand.

Other languages, other habits

German builds names in the same order. Frankfurt is the ford of the Franks, Düsseldorf the village on the river Düssel, and the Schwarzwald the black forest. French borrows from Latin and old local words: Beaumont is a fair hill and Clermont a bright one, while -ville comes from the Latin villa, a country estate. Japanese joins two words and often softens the second, so kawa (river) becomes gawa and shima (island) becomes jima. Shirakawa is the white river and Matsuyama the pine mountain.

The Elven, Dwarven and Desert cultures work differently. Their languages were invented for these tools, so their meanings are made up rather than borrowed from history. They still follow the rule of a describing word and a kind of place, which is why Dwarven names read as halls, gates and forges and Desert names as wells, oases and markets. The Elven words are the ones the Character Name Generator uses for elf names, so an elf from Celvarra, the moonsilver haven, and her home share a language.

Naming a whole map

A map feels lived in when its names agree with each other. Give each region one culture and keep to it, so the northern coast sounds Norse all the way along and the southern hills stay English. Where two cultures meet, let the names mix: a border town might keep an English name for its river crossing while the villages across the water end in -by. Real borders look like that, and readers sense it even if they never say why.

Name the landscape before the towns. Rivers and hills often carry the oldest names on a real map; several English rivers are called Avon, from an older British word for river. Once a river has a name, the fords, bridges and mouths along it can borrow it. Older places deserve older forms, so save -chester and -bury for ancient cities and give a new mining camp a plain -stead or -ton. Regions take the land heads, such as -shire, -dale, -wold and -march.

Checking a name before you keep it

Say it aloud, then say it in a sentence: “We ride for Caldmere at dawn.” If it trips you up, it will trip up your readers or your players. Check it against your cast as well, because a town called Hartley and a knight called Hartwell will be muddled by the third chapter. Change a letter if you must, or swap the head for another of the same size; the meaning on the card tells you what you are keeping and what you are changing. Star the keepers as you go, then copy them with their meanings once the map is finished.