How Places Get Their Names

If you’ve ever tried writing fiction or dabbled in world-building in video or table-top games like Dungeons and Dragons, you may have noticed that one of the more challenging elements is something you may not expect—coming up with place names.

When you think about it, as exotic and evocative as the names some writers can come up with (J.R.R. Tolkien leaps to mind), here in the real world, place names can be a bit on the boring side.

If you’re reading/listening in North America, you might immediately think of how many cities and towns are simply named directly for places from the “Old World”: places like London, Ontario; Paris, Missouri; Brussels, Illinois; Amsterdam, Pennsylvania; Berlin, Connecticut; and Dublin, Texas. Sometimes the founders of places like this put a “new” at the beginning, as in New Hampshire, but sometimes it seems like they were just homesick and wanted a familiar name for their new surroundings.

Beyond just taking an old name and applying it to a new place, most names for cities, towns, and regions can be sorted into two main categories: geography and history. When you get right down to it, places are usually named for the things around them, or someone famous who contributed to their founding, or maybe even both.

For example, the city where I went to university was called Peterborough. It was named for a man named Peter, and the suffix “borough” comes from the same word that lends itself to the endings of places like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Edinburgh, Scotland; it’s derived from an Old English word meaning “hill” or “hill fort.” So Peterborough is “the city on the hill that Peter helped build.” 

Pittsburgh is named for William Pitt and was the site of Fort Pitt.

As for Edinburgh, the first bit is much older and has its own complicated and contested history, but if you’ve ever been, or ever get a chance to visit Edinburgh, you’ll immediately recognize that the “burgh” part is from the hill. The castle is on a huge hill.

In the UK, a lot of places have the ending “-cester” or “-chester” (Manchester may be the most prominent one, but you'll find Dorchester, Gloucester and the famous Worcester as well). That ending comes from a Latin word meaning “fort” or “castle.” So someone built a castle in a nice place, it became more and more well-known as people settled around it, and then eventually that became the name of the city or town or even region itself.

By the way, it might seem like this is a specifically UK thing, but remember how homesickness led to the naming of US and Canadian cities and towns? There are actually 27 towns across the United States named Chester!

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