How to Name Things in Your Setting
By: Lawrence E. Grabowski
Tags: Ttrpgs, Worldbuilding, Scifi Fantasy, Gaming, Writing Tips

You don’t have to be Tolkien to have interesting, consistent names.

Photo by Brian Wangenheim on Unsplash

I hate naming things. I loathe it. If I cannot make the name a pun or funny reference, I will struggle. As I must sometimes have serious names, I’ve been forced to find ways to work around my tendency towards whimsy.

How do you name physical locations?

It’s… complicated. In an awesome way. People frequently name places after an important environmental feature, natural or manmade. For example, Chicago sounds like a random combination of sounds, but, according to one theory, it’s a morphing of checagou, a French spelling of a word in the Miami-Illinois language for what in English are commonly called ramps, which are similar to garlic.

So how do we get from garlic to a random collection of sounds, assuming this theory is correct? The indigenous people had a placed name after garlic. The French used the indigenous term for the place. Eventually, the word was distanced sufficiently from its original context that people no longer ascribed it any meaning other than a geographical location.

Generally, the first people to name a place name it after some feature. When a new group moves in, they adopted the terminology of the first group. In the case of the second group supplanting the first, the original meaning gets forgotten. And the pronunciation is gradually made easier for the speakers in the second group. Finally, the term becomes just the name for the place.

If you’re in the USA, you can see the parts of this process in things like the names of national park. There’s Crater Lake, Great Smoky Mountains, Glacier, etc.

How do you name people?

That depends on the culture. There are a lot of real-world examples you can look to for models. Sometimes there are words that are only used as names, Lawrence, for example. Other times, words relating to something like a trade, hunter, for example, are used as names. And sometimes names may be drawn from the natural world, Amber, for example.

How do you select one? If you’ve got the interest, I would pick the method that helps you elucidate something about the cultures in the world. Otherwise, I’d pick the easiest one.

Avoid getting bogged down by naming things with real-world stand-ins.

If you have a group of people with a common language and culture, they likely have a common naming convention, just like in the real world. Developing a language, or even a naming convention, can be a lot of work. Instead of forcing yourself to grind to a halt on your awesome idea while you come up with a name, you can assign everyone with a similar language and culture a name drawn from a real-world culture.

In addition to reducing the pressure to name things at that moment, it will make it easy for you to keep track of what things need to be named using a similar convention, once you’re ready.

Naming things can be tricky. It can be difficult to make them sound verisimilar, be relevant to the culture they appear in, and carry the themes of your setting. If you don’t have the patience to fiddle with names until they feel correct, you can use a variety of techniques to help get you started.

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