Beach Name Generator

Beaches almost never get named by tourism boards; they get named by fishermen, farmers, surfers and hydrographers who needed to tell one stretch of sand from the next. That is why real beach names are so concrete: Oyster Bay, Herring Cove, Shingle Cove, Seal Haul-Out, Whale Bone Cove. Shape and position names are the next biggest group: Half Moon Bay, Long Strand, North Sands, Back Beach, Town Beach. Saints and monasteries name a surprising number of European beaches (Saint Ives Bay, Priory Bay, Abbey Sands), and hazards and history supply Smugglers Cove, Wreckers Bay and Battery Beach.

Each coast has its own form-word. British and Irish coasts use Beach, Bay, Cove, Sands and Strand, plus Cornish Porth-, Welsh Traeth and Gaelic Camas. Iberian and Latin American coasts use Praia and Playa; Balearic and Sardinian coves are Cala; French and Creole islands use Plage and Anse; Italy uses Spiaggia; Hawaiian names such as Waimea, Hanauma and Punalu'u are usually the older place name with 'Beach' or 'Bay' added in English. Surfers name breaks after what the wave does: the Wedge, the Pipe, the Slot, the Bombie.

When naming a fictional beach, decide who named it and copy their vocabulary. A cove named by 18th-century smugglers, a strand named by a Portuguese pilot and a break named by 1960s surfers will sound nothing alike, and that difference is what makes a coastline feel real.