Fantasy Village Name Generator

How village names are usually built

Village names are smaller and humbler than town names, and they often carry more of the landscape. They tend to be compounds of a plant or an animal and a word for a plain place: a holt for a small wood, a combe for a valley, a cot for a cottage, a worth for an enclosure. Others are possessive and a little jokey, such as Hob's Rest or Maud's Hollow, which suggest that a person once stopped there for good. A prefix such as Little or Nether is how a small place says it is smaller than its neighbour.

The best village names are slightly odd. They make people ask where the name came from, and one line of an answer can carry a whole scene.

Making villages feel like one countryside

Keep the endings of a region modest and repeated, so that a day's walk crosses three -ham villages and a few -ley ones. Let the setting steer the roots: farmland names lean on crops, mills and fields; forest names on trees and clearings; coastal ones on birds, nets and tides. Drop in a few possessive names to suggest that people, not only landscape, made the place. Villages also change over time, so let the oldest ones have worn, shortened names and the newest ones keep their full spelling. If your heroes grow up in one of them, name it first and the rest of the map will follow.

Twenty example village names

• Hob's Rest a hamlet named for a traveller who never left.
• Thistledown a hill village that grows more thistles than crops.
• Willow End the last cottages along a river path.
• Cold Ashby a northern farm village that complains about the wind.
• Fernholt a woodland hamlet with moss on every roof.
• Pennywick a candle-making village.
• Barleycombe farmland tucked in a valley.
• Crooked Stile a village named for a famous accident.
• Mossley a damp, quiet place by a mill pond.
• Nethercot the lower village below a bigger one.
• Sedgeham a reed-cutter's village at the edge of the fens.
• Wrenmoor a heath village with small birds and long winters.
• Dunley a plain farm village.
• Quillby a hamlet that sells goose feathers.
• Maud's Hollow a tiny dip in the road with a famous inn.
• Gorsewick a dairy village on the common.
• Heathcote a few cottages on a wild heath.
• Lark's Green a fair-weather village with a May fair.
• Gullwick a cliff village of fishers.
• Kelpness a headland hamlet that stinks at low tide.