Towns and Cities

[locofife]

You've been given several good suggestions, and I'll just add one more. Whatever you do, please do not make names with apostrophes in the middle! It makes reading it so much more difficult.

 

[Chilari]

A friend I know looks at the sames of little villages in our county, some of which are rather odd, and uses those. Nobody but the residents of the village itself and anyone who drives through it would know. Within 10 miles of where I live there are place names like Potseething Coppice (where water bubbles out of the ground like a boiling pot), Meadowley, Aldenham, Nordley, Linley, Apley, Colmore Green, Ewdness, Catstree, Wyken, Swancote, Burcote, Hoccum and more. Some of these I didn't know about til I looked at Google just now, even though I could probably see parts of them from some of the higher points of my town.

Pick an area far from big towns, zoom in, make a list of what you see and pick what you like best.

 

[Tom]

The Native American names in my area are pretty obscure. Chautauqua, Cattaraugus, Tonawanda, Irondequiot...Some of them mean some weird stuff, too, such as Chautauqua, which translates from Iroquois as "by the shores of the stinking lake". Lake Chautauqua's shoreline does smell a little fishy during summer, especially in the swampy areas.

These unique names have inspired me a lot. Look around your area. I'm sure there are some weird and wonderful place names you could find.

 

[CupofJoe]

A friend I know looks at the sames of little villages in our county, some of which are rather odd, and uses those. Nobody but the residents of the village itself and anyone who drives through it would know. Within 10 miles of where I live there are place names like Potseething Coppice (where water bubbles out of the ground like a boiling pot), Meadowley, Aldenham, Nordley, Linley, Apley, Colmore Green, Ewdness, Catstree, Wyken, Swancote, Burcote, Hoccum and more. Some of these I didn't know about til I looked at Google just now, even though I could probably see parts of them from some of the higher points of my town.

Pick an area far from big towns, zoom in, make a list of what you see and pick what you like best.

Within a few miles of me and each other are Killdevil Copse, Beatdevil Lane and Devilbegon Farm.
There has to be a story behind those, I've looked through the local histories and there is nothing...
Now that has my mind working...

 

[DanJames]

What I usually do is pick a language/naming system that I want to use for my country (say: Armenian) and then tweak names from that system. So my example - Armenian - has a lot of place names that end with -an (Yerevan, Kapan, Hrazdan, Sevan) so perhaps I'll take another syllable and put an -an on the end. I try to make that syllable something with significance for the city, because that's how places are named - for the ruling family or a local feature. So if there's a mountain nearby, the mountain and the town should probably have a similar name, and if the mountain is named after the god who lives there, then there we go. Call the god "Gurd", and the town is now called Gurdan.

The important thing is systems. Towns from the same society should feel like they are related in their names.

Pretty much this, it's also good if you combine different languages. For the desert in my verse, the name Woharan was created. A combination of Sahara, like the desert (which happens to mean great desert in Arabic), and the Afrikaans word for desert, which is Woestyn - this conveinently also means wilderness, because that's what it is, there is only one city in it, even though it makes up 25% of the continent and even then that is underground. Even in terms of the city's name within that, while I haven't declared an official name for it, the English equivelent would be 'Gate of a Billion Grains', because the gate is the only enterance to the city and it only appearances for a short period of time during the year, so the cities name is directly tied to it's most defining feature. Same with a city in the nation to the south, it's a large man-made hole in the ground that started as a quarry to dig up rare ore, so the city is simply named 'The Quarry', this may appear somewhat lazy, and on it's own it is. But all the cities in the southern nation are built with the express purose of mining this ore, so they are all named as such (Quarry, Mine, Pit, Shaft, etc).

 

[ChasingSuns]

Usually what I do is use translators. I take words that describe some aspect of the city and translate them into languages that are close to what I'm looking for. Then I play around with moving letters and syllables until I get something that I like.