How I make memorable placenames in my world

I used to name places in my world based purely off of how cool they sound and if it kinda feels right, but it led to a lot of ambiguity and confusion. They often became like a videogame cutscene crammed with more than 20 main characters in the same frame and they're all visually vying for attention.

For my bright fantasy world, the solution turned out to be straightforward: establish some hard rules, reflecting the genre of the world, and add context whenever the places are mentioned. Let me show you what I mean! 😁

📃 5 Hard rules

These are the hard rules I set for myself when naming places in my world (feel free to copy or adapt these if it works for you, too!):

1. It has to be easy to pronounce at a glance (including changing the spelling so that it's clear what vowel sound to use).
2. The name must not sound too similar or identical to any real world geopolitical or religious connections.
3. The name should feel like it fits with the world's genre and setting alignment.
4. It should give clues or context to what happened or is happening there.
5. (Optional) For larger places like countries, their name should sound similar or connected to nearby places. (For real life inspiration, look at where countries ending in -land or -stan are on the map!)

🤔 Coming up with a placename (example)

Here's my thought process of coming up with some placenames for towns and cities on my map.

First I look at where is is and what geographical features are nearby to see if these can influence the name of the place (such as a coast, river, hill, mountain, or woodland).

For the large cities, I start with random sounds and look for inspiration from things like animal genus names of creatures in the local climate - either to use directly or to modify the spelling into something new.

One that I put for a mountainous city is Buteo, which is a genus of buzzards and hawks that would be found in that area. The name sounds cool on its own and bird-nerds may pick up on the reference, but if one of my characters says "I'm from Buteo" - would you know if that's a realm, a guild, a country, city, or even a small village? So when I reference it in my world, I always say Buteo City. Not all of my cities follow this convention, but it helps for the more obscure ones!

A better example of adding context to placenames is Lurnet Town and Claybanks. From those names alone, can you guess whereabouts these settlements are situated next to? Lurnet (lure+net) is a coastal fishing town, and Claybanks is (you guessed it) on the banks of a river and has a brick making industry.

For other placenames, I look up different toponymy lists (of my audience's primary language for familiarity, and also of places with similar climates to what I'm worldbuilding). This helped me to make settlement names like Mossford (a mossy woodland town that crosses a river "-ford").

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_forms_in_place_names_in_the_British_Isles as an example of how place names in the British Isles are constructed - but use it sparingly unless you want all of your towns to sound like they're in the UK.

👾 Inspirations

I'm currently working on an uplifting, bright fantasy world and two of the biggest influences in my list of inspirations are the worlds of Pokémon and The Legend of Zelda.

I looked at how each of these franchises do their naming conventions so that players don't get lost exploring vast landscapes - most of them include clear context to what the place is about (often in a more obvious way to suit the age of their intended audience) such as: Skyloft, Clock Town, Lavaridge Town, and Snowpoint City.

If you're building in a different genre, take a look at games, books, and films in similar settings to see how their placenames convey the mood!