Coming up with names for places

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Gender Male
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Ok the story im writing has me making up a world. How would ya'll come up with names for towns and countries and other places. If you have a suggestion for a name id' like to hear it too.




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Gender Female
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Web sites, like babynames.com, have become my best friends. I tend to look for names that sound unique enough to work as the name of a place. http://rinkworks.com/namegen/ is a pretty good place to start. I wouldn't recommend http://www.seventhsanctum.com/ unless you're going to be able to differentiate which names they give are obviously just silly...although all of the ones those generators give are pretty silly, so I don't know if I'd really say it's a good site for it. They have links to other generators, though.




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Gender Female
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Think of a normal, everyday word, perphaps the name of a place, and then put it into an anagram maker. You can get some really funny names from there. Also, find words in different languages can be good.
*Don't expect to see me around much in the next couple of weeks. School has started again, and it'll be a couple of weeks before I've settled in. If you've asked me for a critique, you will get it, but not for a little while. Sorry*




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You could always look in a map and take the names of different places. It doesn't have to sound fantasy-ish. The more realistic a place sounds, the better—at least for me it is.
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I've always grown up in or near really small towns, and they have rather strange names...but the trick is that they're familiar, but not entirely recognizable. Take a drive off the interstate and you'll probably find the ones you need. ^_^
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I look at my world/Europe map, pick a city/place that sounds interesting but that I've never heard of, and modify a few letters so that it sounds like a town my character could live in.




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Pick up a road map, it's good when you're a trip too, and look at the places that are nearby. I did this on the way home from a holiday I'd been on once, and found tiny villages called Triangle and Sunk Island. It's fun ^^
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Gender Female
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Same way I choose my character names; take an ordinary word or name, and play around with it. (Bear turned into Byeran, for example).
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