Capital Name Generator

Capital cities are named in a handful of recurring ways, and knowing them makes an invented capital sound like it has a constitution behind it. The most common historical pattern is simply 'the king's town': Königsberg, Kongsberg, Kraljevo, Kingston and Tsargrad all mean exactly that in German, Norwegian, Serbian, English and Slavonic. Emperors named capitals after themselves (Constantinople, Caesaraugusta, Alexandria, Shahjahanabad) or after an idea: Madinat al-Salam, 'City of Peace', was the founding name of Baghdad; Heian-kyō means 'capital of peace and tranquility'; Chang'an means 'perpetual peace'.

Many capitals were never large towns; they were chosen or built for politics. Washington, Canberra, Brasília, Abuja, Astana, Naypyidaw, Putrajaya and New Delhi are all planned capitals sited between rival regions, and their names are deliberately neutral or commemorative. Older kingdoms held court at ritual sites rather than cities: Scone, Tara, Aachen and Karakorum were seats of power because a stone, a hill or a khan's camp was there.

For fantasy, the strongest capital names either use a compound of power-words in a consistent language (Kingsreach, Thronehold, Drakenhold, Aethelburg) or a smooth invented name that sounds older than the kingdom around it (Aurelanth, Thessalor, Vaelith). Give the capital an epithet as well, such as the White City, the First City or the Old Capital, since that is how people inside a realm actually refer to the seat of government.