: What are some good strategies to use when naming a fictional city? I've read a lot of the questions on here concerning naming characters and deciding on whether to use a fictional city. I

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Think first about the country you want your city to be in. Then find out who the first people were that discovered your country. Let's say you want to name a city in Britain. The first people there were the Romans. Think about what the Romans could find special in your city. Maybe there were, I don't know, many bears as they arrived. So you take the Latin word for bear, which is 'ursus'. Now try to make that word sound English. A little hint from my side is that typical endings of cities in Britain are:
-chester
-ton
-ham
-mouth
-ford
or elements from nature like:
-pool
-field
-land
So if you come back to my example you could call your city: Ursmouth, Ursford, or Urspool.
I hope I could help you out <3

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Within the US:

place names all over the country derive from tribal names and native-American toponyms: Seattle, the Dakotas, Massachusetts.
cities are named for prominent people who died before the city was founded; as the countries was settled east-to-west, more westward cities are named for more recent people (William Pitt died in 1778; Lincoln in 1865)
in the Southwest, city names are typically Spanish, often beginning with San/Santa (meaning "sainted" or "holy") or Los/Las/El/La (all words for "the")
in the Midwest, cities often incorporate geographical features, ending in "Falls", "Buffs", or "Hill"
on the East Coast, many cities are named for coastal features: "Bay", "Cove", "Beach".

Pick where you want your city to be (or to suggest being), find a dozen cities in that area, look for a rule, and invent a name that fit both that rule and the mood you are trying to create.

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I like to use a naming generator to help me get an idea of what sort of names fit my story. I typically use pet monkey name generator or behind the name. I look for names sometimes based on meaning or language and other times I browse. Once I hit on a sound I like I alter it to make it mine.

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Think about these general questions:

What era is your story set in? Do the characters use latin, greek, Norwegian to theme all their cities?
Are there multiple countries, and do they have different naming conventions?
Is there something you want to convey in the story, a theme or a motif? Perhaps the name of the city relates to a common theme that runs through it. 'Sin City', 'Kings Landing', 'Sunnydale (an ironic name)'
Think about how the name of the city can play into your story. Do the characters live in a big brother society, where the name of the city holds background connotations or act as a clue to their situation?

In regards to theming your name with a real life location, post-apocalyptic stories do this very well. As time develops, we develop new quirks to our language. We recently add 'new' to the names of cities to signify a new city, or change of culture. 'New York' was to signify the cultural connections of the initial settlers that came from York. However in games such as Fallout, having the names of a real life location acts as a story reveal, for example, 'The Commonwealth' is the name for the post-apocalyptic land of Massachusetts. If you want to set your story in a future society, you could use terms such as New Paris, however it may be even more effective to reveal the history of the location with a unique name that holds connotations to the past.

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