# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Writing, Stories, Linguistics, Toponymy and other wordy stuff ! >  Name parts

## Durakken

Hi. I suck with naming things or take a real long time to name things. Obviously when making a realistic world you need a fairly consistent naming scheme to work with so going through and randomly choosing names or making names up doesn't really suit me and I finally got to a point on a project where I will have to name a lot of things so like always, I want to automate the process.

To do that I need a list of "parts" that would go into any name scheme. That is to say I need a list of things like, "mountain" "large" "river" "Red" "farm" descriptive words that are common and common variations. For example "wood" and "forest"... Also to some degree I also need a list of name meaning and jobs for the personal part of any name.

What do I plan on doing then with this?
Make a simple Javascript based webpage where you can enter in a list of what are the equivalents for those particular words and then have a random generation script that draws from them and creates these place names. I might go even so far as to word degradation and multilevel names like "East Southerton River" which would be the "Eastern River of the Town that is South" which is fairly common.

I'm guessing that there isn't that many words that really can apply but I don't know and I can't find a good list, so please help me ^.^

BTW such a script isn't hard to make, but I won't be able to do it for like a month, but thought I'd ask way in advance because then I can sift through and organize to see how much I need to do before I actually do it. ^.^ 

Thanks in advance!

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## waldronate

One way to go about this is to get a large list of existing names and push them through one of the many dictionary-based synthesizers ( http://mrsharpoblunto.github.io/foswig.js/ is an example of a JavaScript one).

Another way to do this would be to break out the dictionary types by geographic feature types (mountains, hills, lake, river, ocean, valley, forest, etc.) and then have attribute dictionaries (colors, directions, metals, seasons, gods, heavenly bodies, names of local royalty, etc.) that are added. 

A popular elaboration on this is to use the type/attribute generator, but using the "wrong" language. Then your common place terms found on maps such as "Black Forest", "Brown Waters", "Sun Tower", or "Who is this fool who does not know what a mountain is?" all come out exotic and happy. Or mix one "exotic" attribute dictionary with a common type dictionary.

A good starting point for geographic features names in English is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_feature (unsurprising, really). Searches for attributes will turn up similar tables (e.g. color might return something like https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colors ). Now do the same for several languages popular with local explorer tribes (e.g. Spanish, Portugese, tan elfie) and you'll have lots of dictionaries in no time at all.

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## ravells

You may find this thread interesting.
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...highlight=name

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## Durakken

> A good starting point for geographic features names in English is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_feature (unsurprising, really). Searches for attributes will turn up similar tables (e.g. color might return something like https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colors ). Now do the same for several languages popular with local explorer tribes (e.g. Spanish, Portugese, tan elfie) and you'll have lots of dictionaries in no time at all.


I'll have to wait till I get home to look through those wiki articles, because i hate using my tablet to look at web pages... but I don't think those will cover everything, though a good number of things

@ravells, that doesn't look very useful to me from the posted pics, but I'll take a look when I get home. Can't hurt to look at the very least before making something that may prove pointless to make.

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## Durakken

Ok so... this may take a bit more work than originally thought... busy work...

Basically...
The Land form page of wikipedia has all of what I need for Land Type names.

The "Function" part of the equation not so much... I don't have any clue how or where to look for a list like that.

The 3rd part is the main busy work issue I'm having, because it has to do with constructing peoples' name. What's so hard about constructing peoples' names? Well nothing really it's just a matter of to create realistic names you need to find the meanings that have been used, create a list of them, and then decide how removed they are from those original name to decide the mutation that they need. The mutation part is simple enough, however the listing of original meanings...thousands of entries, no free databases with them to download and all online databases don't let you list by meanings so as to get what I want v.v and that is just Given names... Surnames are bit easier so long as all that work is done to begin with because those names are taken from towns, jobs, or "son of" or other such titles.

Soooo Anyone willing to help me with this busy work, and or point out where i can find a list of "functions"

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## waldronate

Personal names are pretty much the same as place names. As you point out, locations, occupations, and personal attributes can all work to form names. 

If you look at http://www.behindthename.com/ for inspiration, you'll see that many of the most popular names (in English-speaking countries, at least) are borrowed from other languages (e.g. "God is my judge" in Hebrew ending up as "Daniel" in English). Slap a diminutive on a noun and you might end up with a name (e.g. take the diminutive form of the word for the traditional Roman hob-nailed military boot and you might see "Caligula"). Call someone "Red" and let the vowel shift slightly and you find yourself at "Reid".

Anyhow, I'm not sure what you mean by the "function" part.

In some cultures, you can trace lineage through family names. For human cultures, if the family name passes through the female line, surnames will multiply over time; if the family name passes through the male line, surnames will tend to consolidate over time (more females survive to reproduction than males). In other cultures,

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## Durakken

I know tha those things work but names generally keep within a fairly small set of meaning from what they could. I'm going to go through a name database, write down all the meanings and parts of common meanings and create a list where I can fill out a made up language's words for those and get returned a meaning. The problem is that there are a lot of names to go through. So I was wondering if someone would be willing to help and go through a portion of the list I'm using and write down all the meanings in notepad, 1 line = 1 meaning to help save me some time ^.^

Location names are created with 1 to 3 parts...
Personal Name, Landform, Function

Riverton for example is created from
Landform = River
Function = Town

I'm sure there are more than the few that I can think of as the ones i can think of are mainly the same - village, town, hamlet, city, fort, farm... There's gotta be more than that.

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## sglod

If you want to get an idea of the parts of placenames, this is a good site; particularly if you want English-sounding names.

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