Origins and Meaning
What inspires Location Names
Locations are more than names on maps. From ships to islands, planets to manor houses, the names of places are influenced by culture, history, and the people who live there. Understanding the patterns behind these names can help you make the world of your story feel more realistic.
Use this generator to find the perfect name for your story’s locations. Set the linguistic heritage behind the name, the era the location was named in, and add keywords. If you don’t see the exact kind of place you want, pick the Custom location type and describe it yourself.
Places Named by Rules, Codes, and Numbers
Navies, governments, and companies often name places using preset systems or codes, to simplify the process. This might indicate the order in which they were built, or the function or aspirations of the place.
- HMS Victory: the Royal Navy named its ships after virtues, for example, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar
- Camp Delta, Guantánamo: American military camps use the phonetic alphabet: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta
- District 12 (Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games): numbering the districts strips identity from the people who reside there
- Room 101 (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four): likewise, numbering rooms in a building can make them feel impersonal and bureaucratic, even when the room is a place of terror
Places Named After People, Gods, and Myths
Places are often named to honor a person… or to claim it for oneself.
- St Petersburg: Whilst the city was initially named to honor the patron saint of the Russian Tsar (Peter the Great), the renaming to Leningrad was a political statement.
- Valhalla: Old Norse for “hall of the slain,” named for the warriors who end up inside it
- Carnegie Hall: named after the man who funded it
- Wayne Manor (DC Comics): named for the family that resides there
- Gondor and Rohan (J.R.R. Tolkien): named after the peoples who live there
Place Names That Describe the Place
The simplest names describe the place itself. These names are easy to remember, and they often outlast the people that originally settle there.
- Blackpool: named after a dark peaty pool that was drained by the town’s settlers
- The Shard: named after its shape, adopting a term coined by critics
- Millennium Falcon (Star Wars): by pairing a grand word with a fast bird to indicate the properties of the vessel, the name is both descriptive and aspirational
- The Wall (George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire): literally named for the ice wall that protects the Seven Kingdoms