Town Name Generator — Fantasy Town, City & Village Names

How to use the town name generator

1. Choose what to name: towns, villages and hamlets, cities and capitals, kingdoms and realms, mountains, lakes and forests, or taverns and inns.
2. Pick one of the 15 styles, from English and medieval to Viking, elven, dwarven, Old West, sci-fi and cozy, or a Japanese, French, German or Spanish feel. Any style mixes them all.
3. To name a place after its founder, type a name or a word in the box (Miller, Ash, your own name). About half the results will use it: Millerford, Fort Miller, Saint-Miller, The Kingdom of Millerland.
4. Press Generate. Tap a name to copy it, and tap ♥ to keep it in your favorites while you build your map.

Each style has its own word bank and its own patterns, so a Nordic town gets Nordic roots and endings, and a Spanish one gets saints, rivers and adjectives that agree with their nouns. Altogether the 15 styles draw on 1,548 hand-picked words and name parts. Every press brings a new list, and a name never comes back twice during a visit. Names that belong to well-known books, films and games are filtered out, so what you get is free to use for a novel, a tabletop campaign, a video game or a school project.

Fantasy town names by style

Here are ten fantasy town names for each style, made by the generator above. Choose the style in the tool for hundreds more.

Village and small town names

Choose Villages & hamlets for smaller places. English villages often carry a word that tells them apart from a bigger neighbor: Little and Great, Upper and Lower, or the Latin Magna (great) and Parva (little). Others are named for their village green or their end of the parish. The generator uses these patterns, along with small-place endings such as -thorpe, -stead and -cote, and hamlet words for the other styles.

• Flintpick Hollow
• Aldea Nueva
• Hrafnvang
• Kleinhaselhausen
• Sahr Wells
• Iwatani
• Golddorf
• Elk Saddle
• El Castillo Sereno
• McCall's Camp
• Thorsby
• Novaspire Homestead
• La Torre Soleada
• Sandpiper Landing
• Upper Cragdale
• Koldeep Camp
• Kindred Farm Dome
• Lower Ornmine

City name ideas

Cities and capitals lean on the grander endings (-chester, -minster, -borough), harbors and river names, and titles such as City of Lanterns for elven capitals. Use this setting for a capital, a trading port or the biggest city on your map.

• Jackalarim
• Market Puddlegrove
• Nakayama
• Bellhaven
• Wayfarer Station
• Great Poppybury
• Stararal
• Myrandel
• Great Sandakh
• Kingsmere
• Achernar Prime
• Alnitak VIII Arcology
• Cinderspire
• Ravencrest Springs
• Kaldssund
• Nishihama City

Kingdom and realm names

A kingdom name can be a single word, like a country, or a title with a place in it: a duchy, an earldom, a free port, a margraviate, a shogunate or a star-faring commonwealth, depending on the style.

• The Realm of Toffeedale
• The Pruitt Territory
• The Kingdom of Cloverhill
• The Barony of Gravemire
• The Kitaguchi Domain
• The County of Redburyshire
• The Merchant League of Anchorwharf
• Higashisono Province
• The Realm of Acorndale
• The Mountain Realm of Whitetop
• The Marquisate of San Benito
• Juniper Butte County
• The Northern Kingdom of Kaldsrud
• Spur Bluff County
• The Viceroyalty of San Bernardo
• The Toyoyama Domain

Names for mountains, rivers, lakes and forests

Choose Mountains, lakes & forests to fill the empty parts of a map: peaks and passes, fjords and skerries, moors and fens, mesas and buttes, nebulae and craters.

• the Photonfield Rift
• High Summit
• the Spires of Ariwyn
• Mont Beaubourg
• Oarstrand Bay
• Mont Rocheclaire
• the River Ouse
• Cedar Pass
• the Cryo Canyon
• Île de Bellefontaine
• the Scorchahr Flats
• Lac de Villeneuve
• the Bahr Salt Pans
• the Myr Barrow
• the Juniper Couloir
• Dawson's Peak

Tavern and inn names

Every adventure needs somewhere to stay the night. Tavern names follow the old English pub-sign pattern of one or two things you could paint on a board (The Hare & Lantern). Some styles have their own kind of inn: an auberge in France, a Gasthaus in Germany, a posada in Spain, a ryokan in Japan, a caravanserai on a desert road, and a canteen on a space station.

• The Jolly Badger
• The Sleepy Owl
• The Wandering Hare
• The Golden Goose
• The Crooked Lantern
• The Silver Kettle
• The Laughing Otter
• The Hearth and Hound
• The Copper Candle
• The Honeycomb Inn
• The Weary Traveler
• The Merry Magpie

• The Ladle & Star
• The Crown & Plough
• The Drowsy Sparrow
• Posada de los Olivos
• Kuromine Teahouse
• The Fujizawa Inn
• The House of Seven Wells
• The Copper Caravanserai
• The Horseshoe & Lasso
• Harper's Trading Post
• The Bashful Mermaid
• The Flickering Moon

What town name endings mean

Real place names are small descriptions. Oxford was the place where oxen crossed the river, and Westminster was the minster west of the City of London. If you know what the parts mean, you can build fantasy names that sound right because they follow the same logic. These are the parts the generator uses most.

The meanings are a guide, not a rule. Some endings have two possible sources (an English -ham can be a homestead or a river meadow), and many names have worn down over the centuries until the old words are hard to see.

Name a town after its founder

Many real towns carry the name of a person: the leader of the first settlers, a landowner or a saint. Type a name into the box and the generator does the same in the style you choose. Here is what Miller and Rose become:

• Miller Prime
• New Miller
• Miller's Landing
• Millerione
• Millerhausen
• Market Millerfield
• Miller Hollow
• Saint-Miller
• Millerville
• Río Miller
• Bad Rosefeld
• Port Rose
• Roseville
• Rosebay
• Roseheim
• Rose Village
• Rosecrest
• Puerto Rose
• Rosestein
• Rose City

How to come up with a good town name

• Start with the land. Is there a river crossing, a hill, a marsh, a harbor or a clearing in a wood? Pick the ending that describes it (-ford, -hurst, -mere, -port, -ley) and add a tree, an animal or a color.
• Keep a region consistent. Towns in one area share a language, so give neighbors the same family of endings. A valley full of -by and -thorpe names feels like Viking country; mix in one -chester and it feels like an old Roman road runs through.
• Let size show. A hamlet is Little Ashcombe or Ashcombe End; the market town is Market Ashcombe; the city is Ashchester.
• Name what happens there. Mills, markets, bridges, chapels and salt works all gave towns their names. A mining town in the mountains might be Orecairn; a fishing village Herring Cove.
• Older places have shorter names. Names wear down when people say them every day for a thousand years. Give your ancient capital a short name and your new frontier towns long, descriptive ones.
• Say it out loud. Characters will say the name in dialogue, so it should be easy to read the first time. Two or three syllables is usually enough.
• Check before you publish. Search the name to make sure it is not a famous place in a book or game, or a real town you did not mean to borrow.

Funny town names in America

Real life beats fiction for funny town names. These weird town names in the USA are all real places; the notes say where they are and, where the story is well known, how they got their names.

Funny and unusual town names around the world

The longest place names in the world

The famous long Welsh town name has 58 letters: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. It was lengthened in the 1860s to attract visitors, and locals simply call the village Llanfairpwll. The Maori name of a hill in New Zealand and the full ceremonial name of Bangkok are longer still. Letter counts below are worked out from the names as written here.

More worldbuilding tools

Fill your new towns with people from the Fantasy Name Generator and the D&D Name Generator, give the ruling families a surname with the Last Name Generator, and put a dragon in the mountains with the Dragon Name Generator. For the elven quarter, the Elf Name Generator has names to match.

The generator can make 6 kinds of names in 15 styles. Everything runs in your browser; nothing you type is sent anywhere.