GUIDE: NAMING A TOWN OR CITY
This post was originally from a FAQ, but since the original link is now defunct, I am re-posting it here.
There are many things to keep in mind when naming the town or city in your novel:
1) Genre/Theme/Tone
It’s very important to consider the genre and theme of your story when choosing a town name. Take these names for example, each of which indicates the genre or theme of the story: King’s Landing (sounds fantastical) Cloud City (sounds futuristic) Silent Hill (sounds scary) Sweet Valley (sounds happy and upbeat) Bikini Bottom (sounds funny) Radiator Springs (sounds car-related) Halloween Town (sounds Halloween-related) Storybrooke (sounds fairytale-related) 2) Time/Place It’s also important to consider the time and place where your story takes place. For example, you wouldn’t use “Vista Gulch” as a name for a town in Victorian England. You probably wouldn’t use it for a town in modern day North Carolina, either. Vista is a Spanish word and would normally be found in places where Spanish names are common, like Spain, Central and South America, the southwest United States (including southern California), Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Florida. 3) Size/Settlement Type An isolated town of 300 people probably won’t be Valley City, but a sprawling metropolis of 30 million could be called Windyville, because it could have started out as a small town and grew into a large city. 4) Geography Words like gulch, butte,and bayou tend to be regional terms. You probably wouldn’t find Berle’s Bayou in Idaho, or Windy Butte in Rhode Island. Words like mount, cape, and valley are dependent upon terrain. Most of the time, you won’t have a town named “mount” something unless there are hills or mountains nearby. You wouldn’t use “cape” unless the town was on a cape, which requires a large body of water. 5) History Is there a historical person or event that your town might be named after? The Simpsons’ hometown of Springfield is ironically named after its founder, Jebediah Springfield. Chattanooga, Tennessee is named after the Cherokee town that was there first. Nargothrond, in The Lord of the Rings, is an Elvish town with an Elvish name. 6) Combination of Words
person name + geographical term = Smithfield, Smith Creek
group name + geographical term = Pioneer Valley, Settlers’ Ridge
descriptive word + geographical term = Mystic Falls, Smoky Hill
person name + settlement type = Smithton, Claraville
landmark + settlement type = Bridgton, Beaconville
Word Lists
Types of Settlements
Geographical Features
Place Words
Common Suffixes
Other Descriptors
Some helpful, basic guidelines for developing a consistent or thematic approach to naming villages or towns or cities in fiction.
And never forget, you can change it later … in fact, one can almost guarantee that the more village, town, or city names you come up with during the worldbuilding phase, the more likely you’ll change one (or all) of them in due time.
