Fantasy town name generator

A good fantasy town name sounds worn smooth, as if people have been saying it for a thousand years. The easiest way to get there is to build it the way English places were named: a first part for what was there, and an ending for what people did with it. Kirk and by give you Kirkby, the village with a church. It’s a real place, and it still says what it was.

How the town name generator builds a place

There are four kinds of town in the banks. Farms and fords join an Old English first element such as Stan or Brock to an ending like ley or ford, sometimes with Little or Chipping in front and sometimes with a river after: Brockley, say, or Stanford-on-Lune. Norse villages use by, thorpe, thwaite and dale. River and coast towns end in mouth, haven, staithe or ferry, and fortress towns take bury or keep.

Untick the kinds you don’t need. A map of one coastline might only want ports, while a border march might want nothing but forts.

What the endings meant

Most of these endings were ordinary words once. Place-name scholars give the commonest these meanings:

Place-name endings and what they meant

Ending	Language	Meaning	Built here
-ham	Old English	a homestead	Elmham
-ton	Old English	a farmstead or enclosure	Stanton
-ford	Old English	a place to cross a river	Stanford
-ley	Old English	a clearing in woodland	Brockley
-bury	Old English burh	a fortified place	Cragbury
-chester, -caster	Latin castra, by way of Old English	a Roman fort	Highcaster
-by	Old Norse	a farm or village	Kirkby
-thorpe	Old Norse	an outlying farm	Gunnthorpe
-thwaite	Old Norse	a clearing or meadow	Holthwaite

So a name can tell a story about the land before anyone has written a line of history. In your world a Coldwell can be the village by a cold spring and an Oakham the homestead in the oaks. Players will rarely ask, but the map feels consistent because the names are.

Norse names in the north and east

Names ending in -by and -thorpe cluster in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the East Midlands, the parts of England where Scandinavian settlers made their homes in the ninth and tenth centuries. That hands a fantasy map a cheap and effective trick. Put the Norse endings in one region and the Old English ones in another, and it looks as if two peoples settled the land at different times. You don’t need a history lesson to feel it.

Making a fantasy town name of your own

Decide what the place is for before you name it. A crossing wants -ford or -bridge, a port wants -mouth or -haven, and a town that grew up round a castle wants -bury or -keep. Then take a first part from the land around it: a tree, an animal, a color, a stone. Real names wear down with use, so squash the result until it’s comfortable to say. Stanton started out as a farmstead on stony ground; the long version has dropped out of speech.

If two places on your map share a name, do what England did and add a word: Great and Little, or Upper and Lower. Chipping marks the one with the market, from the Old English word for a market, as in Chipping Norton.

Names that fit the map

Name the rivers first, then the towns on them, and the map holds together. If you’re drawing the walls and towers as well, how to draw a castle takes a keep from rough masses to battlements in twelve steps. For the people who live there, the fantasy name generator builds characters from the same kind of banks.