# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Writing, Stories, Linguistics, Toponymy and other wordy stuff ! >  Regional Names for the World

## Romulus

I'm working on a world for (at least) three of my stories, shown here.

I've made an excel spreadsheet of different languages' words for "earth," "world," "circle," "ground," etc. The three regions (each in a different era) I'm thinking of are loosely based on the following:

1) Biblical Middle East
2) Middle East and India
3) Western Europe and Celtic

The following are some of the words I like the sounds of best:

*word ---- meaning ---- language
*
Toprak ----- earth ------- Turkish
Heim ------- globe ------- Icelandic
Avanim ----- earth ------- Sanskrit
Werold ----- earth ------- Old English
Hrūse ------ ground ------ Old English
Verǫld ------ earth ------- Norse
Ierde ------- earth ------- Frisian
Wrâld ------- world ------- Frisian
Ierdbol ----- globe -------- Frisian
Alam ------- world -------- Arabic
Jahān ------ world ------- Persian
Adamah* --- earth ------- Hebrew
Eretz ------- earth ------- Hebrew

Obviously these are transliterated and some of the meaning may be lost/mixed up, but I still think it's a good starting point. Does anyone have any that are seem particularly apt to them? Just curious. Thanks.

*If you watch BSG, you now know that Adama means Earth!

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## vorropohaiah

I do like this method of creating region names - come up with relevant suffixes like hill, river, place, land etc and then add prefixes. the ones youve chosen are very cool (I do tend to like old middle-eastern names, like Hebrew, turkish, persian etc. and have used jahan and toprak in my own world). nice stuff

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## Romulus

Using prefixes is a good idea. I think I'll use that for continent or country names. Thanks!

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