Random Island Name Generator

Island names are unusually honest. Sailors named them for what they saw from the deck: a shape (Sugarloaf, Saddle, Half Moon Cay), an animal that lived there (Turtle Island, Seal Island, Isla Tortuga), a resource or danger (Salt Cay, Rum Cay, Wreck Reef, Dead Man's Cay), or a colour (Isla Verde, Eilean Dubh, Black Sand Isle). Colonial charts added saints and patrons (Île Sainte-Marie, Saint Brendan's Isle), and every seafaring language left its own word for island behind: Isla, Ilha, Île, Isola, Eilean, Inish, Ynys, Holm, Skerry, Øy, Motu, Cay, Atoll.

Those words are the fastest way to give an island a home. A cay or atoll is low, sandy, and tropical; a skerry, holm, or rock is a bare northern outcrop; an Isle of X sounds old, English, and slightly legendary; a Motu or a name ending in -tea or -nui belongs in Polynesia. Legendary islands (Avalon, Lyonesse, Hy-Brasil, Penglai, Tír na nÓg) form their own tradition and are worth borrowing for any island that is more rumour than land.

The best island names describe something a character could actually notice on arrival. If the name tells you why someone would go there, or why they should not, it is doing its job.