Random City Name Generator

How this random city name generator works

Press Generate and you get an invented city name. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Every name is made up. Each one is an invented stem joined to a real English place-name ending: ton, ford, ham, field, bury, borough, burgh, chester, minster, bridge, port, mouth, haven, gate.

Which raises the question this page is about. Why do some invented names sound like places, and others sound like a keyboard fell over?

Why "phia" is not a suffix

ton is a suffix. So are ham, ford, bury, field, bridge and chester. Each one turns up in hundreds of English place names, because each one was an ordinary word first and an ending afterwards. Toponymists call them generic elements, and there are catalogues of them.

Attach one to a new stem and you get a name that could exist, because the name has a shape English recognises.

Now take Philadelphia. It ends in phia, and phia is not a suffix at all. It occurs in essentially one city name in the English-speaking world, and only because Philadelphia is a Greek compound that happens to end that way. It is not a morpheme. It is a tail.

The same goes for diff, which is the back half of Cardiff. And oit, which is the back half of Detroit. And oln, which is what is left of Lincoln once you remove Linc.

Chop the last few letters off a column of real cities and you have not made a suffix list. You have made a list of tails. Bolt a stem onto one and you get Tphia, or Stroit, and every reader will feel the wrongness without being able to name it.

A real generic carries meaning. A ford was a river crossing. A bury was a fortified place. A mouth was where the river met the sea. Somebody once stood at the spot and described it, and the description hardened into a name. That is why the ending still works a thousand years later, and why the back half of Detroit does not.

The rules nobody teaches you

The endings are the smaller problem. The beginnings are harder.

Read these aloud. Xfast. Mby. Cdon. Rset. Qoln.

You knew instantly that they were wrong. You probably could not say why. The field that studies why is called phonotactics, and it describes which sounds a language will let you put next to each other.

English permits somewhere around thirty-nine consonant clusters at the start of a word. It will let you begin with str, spl, thr, shr, bl, kw. It will not let you begin with xf, mb, cd, rs or tl.

Nobody is enforcing this. There is no committee. Every speaker of English simply knows, and cannot tell you how. The knowledge arrives before school does and it never leaves.

Which is the interesting thing about a name generator. To pass, an invented word has to obey a rule that its author has never consciously read.

What makes an invented name convincing

Three things, and they are simpler than they look.

A pronounceable opening. Start the stem the way an English syllable starts: a permitted onset, a vowel, an optional light ending. Thr is fine. Sk is fine. A single b is fine. Xf is not.

A familiar ending. One of the real generics, weighted roughly the way England weights them. You will meet ton constantly and minster rarely, because that is how the map actually looks.

The right length. Somewhere between about six and twelve letters. Shorter than six and it reads as an abbreviation. Longer than twelve and it reads as a joke.

The join matters too. A name may carry three consonants across a syllable boundary, because Cambridge and Westminster do. Four is too many. Nothing wants a triple letter.

Get those right and almost anything in the middle will pass. Occasionally a second syllable helps, the way Wall becomes Walling in Wallingford.

The pieces were never arbitrary

Build invented names out of the same pieces England used, and some of them will land on real villages.

That is not a coincidence. It is evidence that the pieces are doing what they always did. Somebody stood at a crossing point on a river and called it a ford. Somebody built a stockade on a hill and called it a bury. A thousand years later the words are still describing the same things, which is why a stem you have never seen, attached to an ending you have seen a hundred times, produces something you would drive to.

So if you generate a name and then find it on a map, you have not caught anybody copying. You have watched the same machine run twice, once in the seventh century and once in your browser.

Ways people actually use this

• Fiction and worldbuilding. What it is for. English-flavoured, so it suits anything vaguely British or vaguely American.
• Games. Generate thirty, keep six, and give each one a river.
• Placeholder data. Better than Lorem Ipsum, and it will never accidentally be a real customer's home town that you then email.
• Teaching. Write Xfast and Thrampton on a board and ask a class which is a possible word. They will all agree, and none of them will know why.
• Naming things that are not cities. Boats, bands, racehorses, fonts. The pattern is doing the work.

Getting more out of the filters

• Contains matches anywhere in the string, so it works as an ending filter. Type chester, bury or ton and watch the character of the results change.
• Type minster for the grandest ending, or holm for the ones that sound Scandinavian.
• Pick a coast. mouth, port and haven between them give you every name that belongs on water.
• Starts with and Ends with compare a single character, so give them one letter and not a word. Vowels are rare at the start, which is itself a fact about English place names.

Questions people ask

Are these real cities?

No. Every name is invented. A few may coincide with small real places, because the generator uses the same word endings that real English place names use.

What is phonotactics?

The set of rules governing which sounds a language allows next to each other. English permits roughly thirty-nine consonant clusters at the start of a word, which is why strong is a possible word and xfast is not.

What is a place-name generic?

The recurring ending of a place name, such as ton, ham, ford, bury or chester. Each was an ordinary word before it became an ending, and each recurs across hundreds of names. Catalogues of them exist, and they are the reason an invented name can sound real.

What makes an invented place name sound convincing?

A pronounceable opening, a familiar ending, and a length between about six and twelve letters. Get those three right and almost anything in the middle will pass.

Why does "Tphia" sound wrong when "Tampton" sounds fine?

Because ton is an ending English uses everywhere, and phia is the tail of a single Greek compound. One carries a meaning that recurs across the map. The other is a fragment of one city's name.

References

1. Consonant cluster
2. Initial consonant clusters in English
3. Phonotactics, Descriptive Linguistics for Teachers
4. List of generic forms in place names in Ireland and the United Kingdom