title_body: Designing a vocabulary for geographical features I want to draw a map of a fictional world resembling Europe in climate and basic geographic features (so there are rivers and lakes, alpine mountains, mittelgebirge, marsh lands and bogs, some plains and forests).
  
  I am thinking of dithematic words (similar to typical endocentric compound words where the second part denotes the general feature and the first part gives a distinguishing detail), so I need words for river, lake, mountain, marsh, bog etc. and some determining words.
  
  However, I want the words to look naturalistic and not overly schematic. What techniques can I use to make the geographical features look naturalistic? 
  
  EDIT: Assume that I have already designed a phonology for my conlang stub, and that I have already some phonotactics and candidate root words. What I am interested in is some natural looking variation of the names to generate.
upvoted_answer: The first thing is: Design not only one word for each geographical feature, use several of them. To give some examples from a natural language (German in this case): A mountain may have a name in -berg (which is frequent in the mittelgebirge) but also -spitze, -horn, -kopf, or -kuppe. Some beacon mountains have names of their own without an element meaning "mountain" (e.g., Brocken, Großer Belchen, Kahler Asten, or Eiger). Similarly, cities are not just -stadt "city", but there are also cities in Germany with names in -burg, -berg, -heim, -reut, -furt, or -hafen.
  
  The second thing is: Hydronyms are special. The names of larger rivers often reflect an older substrate and are not taken from the current language of the place and don't have any transparent meaning. Examples are Potomac, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri in the USA or Thames, Rhine, Rhône, and more in Europe.
  
  With this in mind, the names on the map should show some interesting variation.