Underground City Name Generator

Real underground cities are named for the hole that made them. Derinkuyu in Cappadocia means 'deep well'; Coober Pedy's opal miners live in 'dugouts'; Montreal calls its tunnels simply the Underground City, and the Cold War left behind bunkers with numbers and code words rather than names. Mining language supplies another layer: shaft, adit, stope, drift, gallery, winze and headframe are all real terms, and a town called Crosscut or Headframe Town sounds like it was settled by people who dug it.

Fantasy underground cities split by who lives there. Dwarven holds use hard consonants and a word for 'hall' or 'delve' (Karak Vorn, Khadûm, The Great Delve). Drow and dark elf cities favor apostrophes, sibilants and liquid sounds (Vel'thar, Szithlin, Maerith). Human refugees who fled below tend to reuse surface words with a twist: Undercroft, The Sunken Quarter, Lower Lake Town, Last Light Hold. Sci-fi and post-apocalyptic settings go clinical with vault numbers, sublevels, shelters and station names, then let the inhabitants soften them into nicknames like Lowdeck or The Bottoms.

Whatever the genre, the strongest names say something about the place: what it is lit by (Lanternfall, Sodium City), what it was before (Old Workings, Wine Cellar City), what water it sits on (Cistern Town, Brinewell) or how far down it lies (Ninth Gallery, Bedrock Ward).