Dutch City Name Generator

Dutch place names describe a landscape that people built by hand, so the endings are mostly about water and reclaimed ground. A -dam was a dam across a river (Amsterdam on the Amstel, Rotterdam on the Rotte, Edam on the E), -drecht a ford or ferry crossing (Dordrecht, Zwijndrecht), -sluis a lock, -dijk a dike, -meer a lake (Zoetermeer), -veen drained peat bog (Hoogeveen, Veenendaal), and -zijl a drainage sluice, which is why so many Groningen and Friesland names end that way (Delfzijl). Dry-land endings are -wijk (settlement), -burg (fort), -lo (forest clearing, as in Almelo and Venlo), -hoven or -hove (farmstead), -woude or -wold (woodland), and -kerk.

The apostrophe in 's-Hertogenbosch and 's-Gravenhage is a clipped des, meaning 'of the': the duke's forest and the count's hedge. IJ counts as a single letter, so both halves are capitalised in IJmuiden and IJsselstein. Locators are spelled out in full: Alphen aan den Rijn, Egmond aan Zee, Bergen op Zoom. In Friesland many towns now use official Frisian spellings (Damwâld, Earnewâld, Berltsum), and Frisian village names in -um, -ga and -werd (Wommels, Mantgum, Kimswerd) sound quite different from Holland's.

The list opens with real cities, towns and villages from every province, then moves into invented names that follow the same rules, so you can lift a plausible Dutch setting straight onto a map.