Fantasy State Name Generator

A state name does two jobs at once: it names a piece of land and it tells you how that land is ruled. A 'Free State' (Orange Free State, Irish Free State) signals independence won from someone; a 'March' or 'Mark' (Denmark, the Welsh Marches) is a militarized frontier; a 'Palatinate' or 'Landgraviate' belongs to a count with royal powers; 'Serene Republic' was Venice's way of sounding older and calmer than its rivals. Borrowing these forms, or inventing new ones such as Oathmark or Hexarchy, gives a fantasy polity a constitution without a paragraph of exposition.

The place-name half should follow one linguistic family per region. Germanic-sounding states end in -mark, -holm, -wick and -gard; Romance ones in -ia, -ance and -onte; Slavic ones in -grad, -ova and -nost; desert states borrow Arabic and Persian shapes like -abad, -esh and Ras or Tel prefixes. When neighboring states share a sound family and distant ones do not, readers feel the geography before they see the map.

The list here mixes bare names you can attach any title to with fully styled states, so you can populate a continent: a few great kingdoms, a web of duchies and cantons between them, and the odd island matriarchy or mountain theocracy that makes the world feel lived in.