200+ City Name Ideas for Worldbuilding

A city name is the heaviest label on any map. It has to suggest population, power, and history in a word or two, and it has to sound like something millions of people would actually say every day. The lists below give you more than two hundred ready-to-use city names, sorted into the six styles our generator produces. Each section opens with a short note on the naming patterns that style relies on, so you can extend any list yourself, and standout names carry an epithet or a one-line hook you can paste straight into a gazetteer. Everything here is original; take what you like for maps, fiction, and tabletop worlds. If your settlement is closer to a village than a skyline, our town name generator owns that end of the scale.

Modern metropolis names

Modern big-city names are built from settlement suffixes that wore smooth over centuries: -burg, -ton, -gate, -field, -haven, and -mont. Pair them with civic, mineral, and light vocabulary, or attach a plain term like City, Heights, or Crossing to a founder-style surname. Direction and size prefixes (New, Greater, North, Grand) signal a city that outgrew an older one, which is free implied history.

Ancient imperial names

Imperial capitals lean on the great historical suffixes. Greek -polis means simply "city"; Slavic -grad means a fortified settlement; Persian -abad means "built by" or "abode of"; Latin -ium marks a Roman foundation. The other classic pattern is the founder: real history named Alexandria for Alexander and Caesarea for Caesar, so an invented dynasty name plus a grand suffix or an honorific like Magna or Aeterna reads instantly as an old capital.

Sci-fi megacity names

Sci-fi city names are engineered rather than inherited, and the naming patterns say so. Prefixes like Neo-, Arc-, and Axis- imply a rebuilt or planned settlement; designations like Prime, Zero, and Terminus imply a numbered network of cities rather than a lone one; fused compounds from technical vocabulary (chrome, ion, vector, grid) read as corporate christenings. The trick is restraint: one construction per name, or the future starts to parody itself.

Fantasy capital names

A fantasy capital needs weight, and weight comes from three sources: melodic invented roots (two or three syllables with a strong stress), compounds built from throne-room vocabulary (crown, oath, dawn, ever), and epithets that trail the name like a title. "Crownhold" is a city; "Crownhold, seat of the Silver Concord" is a civilization. Use the honorific prefixes High, Old, Great, and Royal sparingly, for the one city on the map that has earned them.

Port city names

Great harbors get named twice: once by geography (the mouth, the bay, the quay) and once by trade (salt, spice, copper, lanterns). The two strongest patterns are "Port (Name)", which reads as a founding charter, and the fused compound ending in -haven, -mouth, -wick, or -stad, which reads as a settlement that grew up around its anchorage. Epithets here should smell of the sea: gateways, straits, and the last safe water before the open ocean.

Ruined and lost city names

A ruined city is named by the people who remember it, not the people who lived there, so the patterns are elegiac: a state prefix (Old, Fallen, Lost, Sunken, Silent, Forgotten), the formal "The Ruins of" construction, or a bare ancient root that no living language quite explains. Epithets do the archaeology for you: say what swallowed the place, and the reader will start digging.

How to use these lists well

Treat each list as a naming culture, not a grab bag. A single map rarely needs more than one imperial capital, and a chain of trade ports feels real when their names share suffixes and sounds, because real coastlines were named by the same sailors over generations. Mix styles only where history justifies it: a modern metropolis built on imperial ruins can honestly carry a name like New Sarnopolis, and that one name tells a thousand years of story. When a name here is close but not right, keep its skeleton and swap the flesh: the pattern behind Saltcrown also yields Spicecrown and Tidecrown, and every "The Ruins of" name improves when the root gets stranger.

And when the lists run dry, the generator on our front page builds names from the same six styles in unlimited batches, many with an epithet attached. Generate more than you need, keep the two or three that suggest a skyline or a fallen age on their own, and bench the rest for the next blank region of your map. For the settlements too small to earn an epithet, cross over to the town name generator and name their villages to match.