Plaza Name Generator

A plaza is named for whatever it faces or whatever happened there. Spanish and Latin American squares take the church, the town hall or a date (Plaza de la Catedral, Plaza del Ayuntamiento, Plaza Primero de Mayo); Italian piazzas take a saint, a civic building or the trade once held on the cobbles (Piazza San Lorenzo, Piazza della Signoria, Piazza delle Erbe); German and Dutch squares are plain about their old market function (Kornmarkt, Fischmarkt, Grote Markt); English squares favour a patron or a guild (St. Anne's Square, Weavers Square). In North America the word has drifted toward commerce, so a plaza is just as likely to be a strip of shops named after a tree or a nearby road.

The article and the language do most of the placing. Plaza de, Piazza, Place and Praça immediately set a country and a century; a bare surname plus Plaza (Harrowgate Plaza, Whitlock Plaza) reads as a mid-century commercial development; The plus a noun (The Cornmarket, The Quadrangle) suggests a square locals have named for themselves. Civic squares tend toward abstractions like Liberty, Independence and Republic, while shopping plazas borrow soft landscape words like Willowmere and Lakeshore.

Use the mix to name the central square of a fantasy capital, a piazza in a travel novel, or a real retail plaza.