Novelcrafter

Idea Generator

City Name Generator

Create names for kingdoms, capitals, port cities, market towns, farming villages, and frontier settlements.

Location Description

Describe the settlement's size, location, history, unique feature, or the people there.

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Modifiers

Select modifiers to influence the style of names generated.

Name Length
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Origins and Meaning

What inspires City Names

Cities don’t exist in a vacuum. They, and their names, are influenced by the people who live there, the geography that surrounds them, and the events that occur.

The names of places often erode over time, slowly becoming those recognizable to modern ears. Take York, a city in northern England; it was originally called Eboracum by the Romans, then Eoforwic by the Anglo-Saxons, and finally York by the Normans. Each name change reflected the language of the people who lived there at the time.

Use this generator to create names for your cities, towns, villages, and kingdoms. Set the linguistic heritage behind the name, the era the settlement was named in, and add keywords.

How Geography Shaped Our Earliest Place Names

Many of the first settlements were named for the geographic landmarks around settlers: fords, lakes, mountains. Begun as directions or descriptors, these were later adopted as a place’s name.

  1. Interlaken: meaning “between the lakes,” the name literally describes its location
  2. Stonebridge: named for a stone crossing over a waterway
  3. Riverrun (George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire): the seat of House Tully, named for the point where two rivers meet

Place Names Honouring Founders, Leaders, and Saints

As communities grew, it became common to name settlements after the people who founded, led, or protected them.

  1. Charleston: named after King Charles II
  2. St Albans: honouring Alban, Britain’s first Christian martyr
  3. Peterborough: named for St Peter, to whom the local abbey was dedicated

How Industry/Resources Shaped Place Names

People also tend to name their towns and cities after the dominant trade or industry that supports them. These names linger, even after the original trade has declined.

  1. Salford: a ford used for transporting salt
  2. Argentina: from the Latin for silver, after the Río de la Plata and the metal Europeans believed was upriver
  3. Copenhagen: from København, “merchants’ harbour”
  4. Coketown (Dickens, Hard Times): a grim industrial city defined entirely by its coal-fuelled factories