Desert Planet Name Generator

The best-known desert planets in fiction share a sound. Arrakis, Tatooine, Jakku, Jedha and Kharak are all short, hard-edged names with open vowels and throaty consonants (k, kh, q, r), which borrow the texture of real desert languages: Arabic, Berber, Persian and the Aboriginal and Nahuatl names scattered across Earth's own drylands. A convincing desert world name usually sounds dry in the mouth. Avoid soft clusters like -elle or -ia that suggest forests and oceans, and lean on names that could plausibly be shouted across a dune in a sandstorm.

There are three common styles here. Invented names such as Kharsis, Sabakh and Ossandra work for planets with their own native cultures and long histories. Catalog designations like Ochre-7, Kessar Prime and Tyr IX suit colony worlds and survey charts, where the name was assigned by a bureaucracy before anyone lived there. English compound names like Glassmere, Sunscar and Saltmarrow fit frontier settings where settlers named the place after what it did to them, much as Death Valley or the Badlands were named.

When you pick one, think about who named the planet. Natives name it for what it is; explorers name it for how it looked from orbit; settlers name it for what they lost there.