Thus it is named
Introduction: What's in a name?
If you've ever written, or even considered writing, a story set in another place or time, you've likely run into the problem of names. Everything needs one. Everybody needs one. But they're not easy.
Coming up with the right names is one of the hallmarks of a great author. Good names fit the setting, helping a reader suspend disbelief and giving the impression that this created world is, in fact, real. In addition, they can set the atmosphere, drawing on the shared culture we already know to predispose us to see a person or place in a specific light. The humble Shire, for instance, sounds like a nice place to live. Winterfell is very obviously somewhere that gets pretty cold. Death Mountain? Nope, wouldn't want to go there at all.
But naming is an art as difficult to master as any part of writing. After almost a decade, I still struggle to find the right name to put on the page, and I know many of mine come across as boring, generic, derivative. Or, all too often, meaningless and disconnected. That's especially true for place names, which are the subject of this particular column. (Later on, we can look at personal names for characters, a subject that could easily fill an entire book.)
Instead of being advice, then, this is more of an exploration of naming in general, with some thoughts on how to incorporate natural naming strategies from the real world into your creations. In other words, I'm going to be rambling even more than usual, but it's for a good cause. Trust me.
In the beginning was the word
Think of the places around you. Your hometown, your state or province, the rivers and lakes and mountains nearby. How did they get their names?
Even without looking things up on Wikipedia or some etymology site (if you have one of those for place names, please share it!), you can probably get a good idea. For me, the names come in a few general flavors. Quite a few are named after important people from the region: Hamilton County, after Alexander Hamilton; Calhoun, Georgia, after John C. Calhoun; Rossville, once home to John Ross.
Another theme is that peculiar sort of flattery that is the namesake. Athens, whether the town in Tennessee or the bigger, but more distant, Georgia city, ultimately derives from the much more famous Greek capital. Trenton might be named after the one in New Jersey, but its roots come from England. Casting a wider net, we find Memphis, Tennessee; Cairo, Georgia (pronounced "kay-row" for whatever reason); Frankfurt and London, Kentucky.
These should already suggest some possibilities for your own place names. You can take names of famous people in your setting and derive names for cities and counties—or the culture's equivalents. Or perhaps the denizens admired a specific place and chose to echo its luster in their own humble abode.
Problem is, that only moves the hard part a step back, because where did those names come from?
A lot of the local features will get "simple" names. In my vicinity, I can think of many good examples. Signal Mountain and Lookout Mountain are so named because those were their respective purposes for the Confederate Army camped around here during the Civil War. Red Bank? Well, a lot of the branches of the Tennessee River, especially around here, have a distinct red clay on their banks. Sale Creek was, surprisingly, the site of a treaty involving the sale of land.
The key here is that the name of a place captures something about its essence. England is famous for this sort of naming, one reason why fantasy novels use it as a model. Think of all those "simple" English place names. Liverpool. Yorkshire. Even the aforementioned Trenton: the town (-ton) on the Trent. Oxford is just a ford that had something to do with oxen. Essex, the land of the East Saxons. "Burg" has become "bury" over time, thanks to the wonders of linguistic evolution, but the sense of "this particular fortified settlement" gave rise to Canterbury, Aylesbury, and so many more.
Of course, every language has words for villages, towns, hills, bridges, rivers, lakes, bogs, fields, fords, and anything else you can label on a map. We speak English, so we recognize such elements best in English place names, but they're really all around the world. Islamabad, Pakistan, has a name that translates literally as "the city of Islam." Belgrade, capital of Serbia, is the "white city"—the compound uses the same elements as the names Belarus (the "White Rus") and Leningrad ("Lenin's city," now Saint Petersberg, Russia) from related Slavic languages.
The more obscure the language is to us, the harder it will be to see how it comes together. Where I live, that's most evident in the numerous Cherokee names that have been Anglicized in sometimes confusing ways. Most people wouldn't know the stories behind the names of Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Ooltewah, the Hiwassee and Ocoee rivers, or indeed the state of Tennessee itself. But they did mean something to the people who once lived here.
If anything, that can give authors an out. Assuming your setting supports it, you can make up a name and claim it originated in a culture that's no longer present. You don't necessarily have to go to the trouble of defining what it means in that other language. (If you really want to, I humbly suggest looking into the art of constructed languages, or conlangs.) All that matters is that the name did mean something to someone, even if they're all dead and gone.
The myth, the legend
The connection between names and stories runs deep, but it originally ran in the opposite direction. Instead of trying to find names that fit fiction, it's almost universal that ancient cultures created stories to fit names.
Many of the oldest known tales, now widely considered myths or legends, fall into this category. Before the invention of writing, stories were harder to remember, but also more necessary, and these naming myths helped define the world the people were trying to understand. One of the most famous—at least among people I know—actually comes to us from the book of Genesis. The Tower of Babel, whose rise and fall are chronicled in Genesis 11:1-9, is named that because, as the story tells us, it is from there that God descended from the heavens to confound the language of the world. And that's basically a Hebrew pun: the similar-sounding word balal, used in the final verse, roughly translates as "to confuse."
Writers of stories meant to be in a "folklore" style follow such examples. As with anything involving the intersection of fiction and languages, Tolkien is a great example here. Many times in The Silmarillion, you will see the telltale phrase "and thus it was called..." That's flavor text, nothing more. It's one more way to create that impression of verisimilitude which sets the great apart from the merely good.
So names and tales have always been intimately entwined. If it fits your setting, you might even find a way to use the more traditional side of that connection. Maybe some random place of local importance has a strange name because of something that happened there in the past. It could even be a way to for those who live near it to spot outsiders.
Giving you a number
Almost all of that is more in line with fantasy, so science fiction authors might be wondering if I have anything to offer on that end of the spectrum. Well, yeah. Look at the scroll bar. We're only halfway done here!
Space-based sci-fi obviously needs a lot of place names. The exploratory sort, with the intrepid starship captain meeting a new race of aliens each week, can get by with some funny-sounding nonsense words, but the "colonial" style, where much of the emphasis is on interplanetary or interstellar human migration, is going to provide the same sort of impetus as any kind of settlement.
In other words, the colonists, whether they're on Mars or the fourth planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system, are going to name their new surroundings, and they're going to follow the same general rules as their ancestors did for their new world. Names from home are going to make up a large portion; depending on who founded the colony, you might get a mix of sources. Future generations may wonder why their domes are built beside the New Thames, but it made perfect sense to the five explorers who all happened to be from around London.
Namesakes provide a wealth of possibilities, then. But you're not limited to places on Earth. Cities and geographical features can be named after people, too. Indeed, surface features on other bodies—planets, moons, asteroids, and the completely nonsensical category of "dwarf planets"—often get named after people. Usually, these are famous scientists, explorers, or other notables: the lunar Shackleton crater, Mars' Schiaparelli, and so on.
Mythology also comes into play, mostly because astronomers are romantics at heart. Thus, the massive mountain of Mars earned the name Olympus Mons. Titan's sea of liquid methane gets to be Kraken Mare. Jupiter's uncountable moons have somehow not yet exhausted the list of women, ah, courted by Zeus. And there's a longstanding tradition in science fiction that a major planet beyond Pluto just has to be named Persephone.
For the stars themselves, or planets orbiting them, the IAU has done us a disservice. Truth be told, it's not the first time, but this one's more severe for us authors. Apart from the thousand or so stars that are both bright enough to be seen with the naked eye and important enough to be noticed throughout history, very few have "proper" names. Sirius, Vega, and Deneb are among the exceptions; they aren't the rule for the galaxy. Many do get the curious mix of Greek and Latin that gave us Alpha Centauri and Omicron Persei, but they're still a small minority of what's up there.
Most stars are allowed nothing more than a series of catalog designations. The Henry Draper Catalog, for instance, is the source of all those "HD 123456" type stars, while those like Gliese 581 instead come from, conveniently enough, the Gliese Catalog of Nearby Stars. As more and more planet-hunting and astrometric programs have discovered hitherto unknown stars, we've seen an explosion of new catalogs, some of them even making their way into the common vernacular. Even a rookie author has probably heard about Kepler and Gaia, while serious lovers of science will recognize designations from TESS, OGLE, and 2MASS.
Exoplanets—planets orbiting suns other than ours, or possibly no sun at all—aren't much better. Except for rogue planets, which we haven't yet discovered, their names are simply derived from their host stars: TRAPPIST-1 e, 55 Cancri e, Proxima b. True, a few of the most prominent received semi-official "real" names recently, but we know of over 4,000 planets beyond our solar system, and we're only going to discover more.
Since fiction doesn't always have to play by the rules of the real world, we can imagine a future in which we do colonize the stars. Those colonists will want to give their new homes proper names, because who wants to be known as a resident of HD 136713 d? Better to come up with something flashier and more memorable. Something to inspire pride. They're not going to care what the IAU says, either. Which gives you free reign.
Obviously, they're going to use the same methods as any other culture, so it's really up to you. They could name their worlds after their founders, their favorite leaders from Earth, their favorite bands. You can come up with a couple of decent names that fit your setting perfectly, or you could design a universal system of exoplanet nomenclature. Not that anyone would go that far. Um, right?
In conclusion
Unlike many aspects of writing, there's no silver bullet for creating place names. They need some thought on your part. But we can take a few shortcuts to ease the burden.
First, if you're writing a story set in the real world, your job is mostly done the minute you start. Just use the actual names wherever possible. If not—you need, say, a fictitious street name—look around for analogies.
Keep in mind that the names you give your places are going to give your readers certain expectations. Names are cultural, so giving a city a name that sounds very obviously French or Japanese (to take a couple of examples) will color your audience's perceptions. And such connotations might not be appropriate, especially if you're writing fantasy. On the other hand, cultural analogy can go a long way toward creating a mental image...if it fits. Use your best judgment here.
If you've done a lot of worldbuilding already, to the point where your setting has a well-defined history, this can provide a good source of names. Best of all would be a conlang, even if it's just a simple "naming language" that serves no other purpose, but that's a serious undertaking most authors won't ever need to try. Merely having a few personal names of historical figures in mind—which may come from your story planning—provides a base, because naming places after people is, as we've seen, a time-honored tradition. It won't be out of the ordinary at all.
One last thing to consider is that this flow of names can also run in the opposite direction. Place names can get picked back up into the lexicon as common nouns and adjectives, if there's a strong enough association between a place and a quality. The word "alpine" is a good example of this, though more common are phrases describing local species or substances: Epsom salts, American chestnuts. Some cultures may be more predisposed to this kind of borrowing, and yours might be one of them.
As I said, this one was a ramble. And it took forever to write, which I should have seen as a sign that it wasn't going to work as a column. Too late.
Thanks for reading and bearing with me. I'll get to personal names in a later post, and I may go into deeper detail about specifics, assuming there's interest. In other words, let me know what you think. Comment and share, and help me get this place growing. Most of all, keep reading!