City Name Generator

Real city names are almost never invented from nothing. They describe a feature (Oxford, Stuttgart, Río Claro), honor a founder or saint (Adelaide, San Rafael, Sankt Veit), or grow out of an older word for fort, port or market: the -burg, -bury, -chester, -haven, -ford, -grad and -pur endings that still mark hundreds of cities today. A convincing fake city borrows one of those patterns rather than stringing fantasy syllables together, which is why Harrowgate, Valderra and Novoberezk read as places while random letters do not.

The names here are grouped by the regions they imitate. English-style cities use surname-plus-suffix and landmark compounds (Brackenridge, Millhaven, Port Ellery). Romance-language cities follow Spanish, Italian and French habits: saints, colors and water words (Santa Marisol, Castelmare, Rivière-Claire). Germanic and Nordic names lean on -hafen, -stadt, -vik and -sund; Slavic ones on -grad, -ov and -ets; and there are Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Southeast Asian and Swahili-style cities for maps that need a whole world rather than one corner of it. A short run of invented metropolis names (Meridia, Lumenport, Vantara) covers near-future and big-city settings.

Pick by region first, then by size: a sprawling capital usually carries a shorter, older-sounding name than a young suburb, and a port almost always mentions the water.