Naming stuff in your game

Not sure if this is the spot to post this but if not Im sure the moderators will be Quick to move it so :D

I've met several People on this forum who have trouble naming stuff, especially towns and such. So I thought i'd share my way of doing it maybe it'll be usefull to others aswell, or not.

Anyway I tend to look at what defines A town so maybe it's A fishing Village or trade hub. Then I search for related words in other languages. Mainly ancient greek, Arabic, hebrew, etc dependend on what the biome is of that town and then I bastardize the word a bit. Usually you'll end up with A name that sounds nice and makes sense too which I personally like.

Anyway, that's Just how I do it and there are hundreds of different ways to do it but since I met so many people having difficulty with it I thought Id share.
Good luck to everyone with their projects.

^This.

A lot of towns are named after nearby geographical features (or sometimes the feature and the name of the first settler). And in some cases, the place is renamed after that very same feature when the next invader come around and take the place.

One of my favourite places I've read about is a place called Torpenhow Hill. Apparently Tor, Pen and How all mean "hill" in different languages, so it roughly translates to "hill-hill-hill-hill". I've never been there, but I imagine its not a very flat area.

@FrozenNorseman Yeah A lot of real world places use this method. Towns that translate to 'on the river', 'forest black', etc.

I'm pretty unimaginative when it comes to making up names, so I tend to take a real-life town name and then horribly mangle it into something that's barely recognisable. Throw in a word or two that loosely describes the place, put it in the blender once more and presto!

If nothing else, the result sounds pretty unique to me.

Well it's better than my method.

I hate naming stuff, so I just pick a random word and add "ia" at the end of it most of the time.
Example: Hard -> Hardia

Or sometimes I just pick a name from a book I read lol.

No one use random generator?

I usually take inspiration from the irl counterpart, and twisted it.

@TheoAllen Lol didn't think about that. Will definitely use that from now on.

A good amount of the town names I come up with are actually just named after real-life surnames. You can find a lot of cool-sounding names from http://www.20000-names.com/surnames_family_names.htm since a lot of surnames are very location-oriented in meaning. "Ainsley" and "Sheridan" are notable town names from my game. Sometimes I also take a bastardized surname and add a few extra words to it. "Cynnward" is a combo of the name Cynn and Ward. Then I have town names which are either stemmed from a word(s) like "Empyrea" (derived from the word Empyrean) or "Quaymar" (combo of Quay and Marine, clearly making it sound like a port town of some sort), and sometimes I even swipe place named from mythologies. "Alfheim" is the name of a rebel base in my game that is mostly comprised of, as the name suggests, elves. The name originates from one of the nine realms of Norse mythology.