The Naming of Places (Part 3): The Lost Coast

I'm still not entirely sure about my approach to generating place names, but I'll start off by working on place names for “The Lost Coast."  The idea with the Lost Coast was to create a stretch of flat, empty coastline on the map and then give it an evocative name to create a little mystery.  So far I've just worked on creating and labeling a spot, but I've just been using “The Lost Coast" label for all of them as a placeholder.

I'd like to generate a name that indicates that this stretch of coast is empty for some mysterious or negative reason.  It's filled with poisonous vapors, perhaps, or frequented by pirates, or ... well, use your imagination.  Place names tend to be short and pithy -- names like “Pirate Island" and not like “The Small Island of Cimmerian Pirates and a Mountain With Mysterious Caves," so to start with I'll just try to create names in the form “The <Adjective> Coast," where the adjective phrase is just a single word, e.g., “The Lost Coast," “The Empty Coast", etc.  (And I'll elaborate further as I go.)

This is a little more focused than naming something like a mountain range, because in this case I know I want a name that conveys a specific meaning or mood, so the choice of names is much more constrained and manageable.

The first step is to collect appropriate adjectives.  To do this, I start with “lost," “empty" and some other appropriate adjectives that occur to me and then I use Thesaurus.com to find appropriate synonyms.  And I repeat that with all the synonyms I find, and so on.  Altogether, that takes about four hours.  I also add in a list of common fantasy monsters (e.g., “The Troll Coast").  I don't go looking for archaic terms because at this point I have almost 350 terms:

forgotten	bitter	trackless
cursed	heartless	burning
damned	bloodthirsty	flaming
doomed	demonic	smoldering
accursed	malevolent	festering
blasted	monstrous	putrefying
infernal	craggy	rotting
unlucky	jagged	bubbling
dead	fatal	reeking
unfortunate	perilous	stinking
empty	treacherous	malodorous
barren	menacing	fetid
arid	savage	rancid
deserted	vicious	mephitic
desolate	barbarian	leaden
abandoned	primitive	afflicted
forsaken	savage	grieving
godforsaken	feral	futile
destitute	uninhabited	sterile
forlorn	lethal	impassable
lonely	toxic	merciless
solitary	pestilent	unforgiving
dreary	grisly	cutthroat
lonesome	terrible	harsh
ruined	hideous	acrid
friendless	uncharted	hard
dismal	unmapped	adamantine
backward	undiscovered	callous
gloomy	unexplored	ruthless
miserable	untraveled	killing
wicked	unseen	slaying
stony	secret	diabolic
desperate	enigmatic	nefarious
tragic	cryptic	criminal
wretched	arcane	outlaw
hidden	unknowable	bandit
bleak	delphic	raider
somber	sybilline	buccaneer
windy	augural	corsair
black	fatidic	picaroon
funeral	vatical	rogue
melancholy	incomprehensible	blackguard
mournful	untold	charlatan
weary	uncounted	trickster
ravaged	masked	freebooter
ghastly	cloaked	highwayman
murky	clandestine	privateer
dark	concealed	robber
doleful	enshrouded	fugitive
dolorous	tainted	marauder
hopeless	infected	berserker
shadowy	defiled	brigand
sepulchral	spoiled	pariah
caliginous	emaciated	leper
wailing	harsh	pirate
abominable	weather-beaten	rover
nefarious	weatherworn	satanic
profane	lightless	sinister
worthless	unlit	foreboding
cruel	frigid	unlucky
rocky	frozen	ominous
dangerous	icy	horrible
violent	algific	fiendish
wild	shivering	teratoid
deadly	wintry	bloody
dire	brumal	blood-soaked
grim	hiemal	bloodstained
unknown	torrid	blood-spattered
shrouded	blistering	suicidal
veiled	scorching	malefic
blighted	sweltering	louring
gaunt	searing	rabid
windswept	austral	ancient
tenebrous	blazing	primeval
stormy	broiling	primordial
starless	scalding	baleful
stygian	steaming	mephitic
devastated	recalescent	abhorrent
pillaged	desecrated	frightful
plundered	looted	horrid
shattered	stolen	false
spoiled	purloined	deceptive
wasted	poacher's	Basilisk
ashen	broken	Centaur
pallid	blasted	Chimera
uncanny	cracked	Cockatrice
foggy	fractured	Djinni
misty	crippled	Dragon
glowering	splintered	Dwarven
impenetrable	corrupted	Elvish
smoky	gray	Gargoyle
nubilous	cinereal	Gnoll
cimmerian	drab	Gnome
sunless	muddy	Goblin
dolent	dusty	Gorgon
woebegone	sallow	Griffon
impossible	ashy	Hippogriff
deathly	colorless	Hobgoblin
weeping	faded	Hydra
howling	eerie	Kobold
groaning	unexplained	Manticore
growling	unnamed	Medusae
shrieking	nameless	Minotaur
keening	mysterious	Mummy
bellowing	occult	Ogre
whimpering	mystical	Orc
crying	orphic	Skeleton
screaming	acroamatic	Spectre
barking	unearthly	Ent
dreadful	ethereal	Troll
godless	haunted	Vampire
unhallowed	tormented	Wight
pagan	vaporous	Wraith
heathen	impassable	Wyvern
unholy	pathless	Zombie

These aren't in any particular order, but they're all “reasons you wouldn't want to be here" in some sense or another.  Some are very specific, such as “deathly" or “blood-spattered" but others only hint at why the coast is uninhabited:  “eerie", “shrieking" and so on.  It was a lot of work to put this list together, and I can see that it's going to be a lot of work if I have to do this for every type of place name.  On the other hand, I'm not sure I have any better approach available.  For cases where I have a list of example place names (e.g., a list of river names in the US), I can take advantage of that to generate a list of candidate names.  But I don't have a good list of example place names for “Lonely Coasts" and I found in going through the synonyms that I had to apply a lot of judgement to pick and choose among the synonyms.  So maybe this is the best approach available.

It's also apparent to me that if these words were annotated with meaning, it would make it easier to re-use the lists.  For example, suppose I want to create a “Lonely Mountain" as in The Hobbit -- a single mountain in the middle of a plain -- and give it a place name.  The words in the Lost Coast list that have some semantic connection to the concept of “lonely" could be reused to name the mountain -- “The Abandoned Mountain," “The Forgotten Mountain," and so on.  An initial approach might just be to sort the words into categories of this sort.  But some of the words that have nothing to do with loneliness seem suitable as well -- “The Haunted Mountain," for example.  So perhaps it's just going to require a lot of work and a custom approach for each place name.

I also want some variation in the “Coast" part of the place name, so I go through a similar process to collect synonyms for coast.  There are far fewer of these -- really, in common usage the only synonyms are “coast" and “shore", although “strand" and “bank" are probably familiar to many people.  For some variety, I can throw in archaic forms and words for “cliffs" -- even though on my maps these areas are not usually cliffs.  That gets me this list:

coast	foreshore	bracks
shore	tidewater	bluffs
shores	seaside	scarps
strand	shoreside	glint
bank	seaboard	ledra
banks	cliffs	staithe
slakes	cleo	brink
outland	cleeves	rivage
warth	cloughs	verge
wash	heughs

Some of these words are fairly obscure, but context on the map should make the meaning obvious.  Note that in this list, I have to manually decide whether using the singular, the plural or either makes sense.  For example, “shore" can be either (e.g., “The Lost Shore" or “The Lost Shores") but “coast" only works in the singular, and “bluffs" only works in the plural.

Now I can create a new label by selecting randomly from each list:

The Wraith Coast
The Violent Verge
The Grim Coast
The Bandit Bank
The Baleful Coast
The Delphic Bank
The Deceptive Slakes
The Primitive Warth

If the modifier in the Lost Coast name is (or can be) a noun, then an alternate form of naming is to say “The Coast of <noun>."  For example, another way to say “The Wraith Coast" is “The Coast of Wraiths."  This variant adds some more variety to the naming, but notice that you cannot just swap the words around between the two forms.  For that reason, I've set up a second list of adjectives specifically for this form that (mostly) don't overlap with the first list of adjectives.

The Kobold Strand
The Dark Rivage
The Strand of Blasphemy
The Tidewater of Lost Hopes
The Seaside of Chimeras
The Bank of Monsters
The Brumal Strand
The Shore of Manticores

This tends to produce too many obscure terms for “coast".  I need to weight the “coast" terms so that the more common usages get picked more frequently than the obscure ones.  Because of the size and diversity of the adjectives list, it's not really a problem to pick among all those alternatives equally.  But the “coast" list is much smaller and some of the synonyms are quite obscure so I probably don't want to use them too often.  The weights may take some tweaking, but here's a weighted sample:

The Sweltering Coast
The Bank of Lost Hope
The Louring Shore
The Devastated Shore
The Pagan Coast
The Unholy Shores
The Coast of Griffons
The Cleeves of Kobolds
The Bluffs of Centaurs
The Coast of Orcs

The list is now much heavier on the common terms like “coast" and “shore."

The Coast of Vampires, in ti Numru Bay, Zomle Zo

Normally, a generic geographical feature might be labeled with someone's name, like “Jason's Point" or “Frederick Mountain."  That's not something that's too commonly done with coastlines (in truth, coastlines are rarely named per se), but at any rate it's not something I can do here because a name like “Jason's Coast" doesn't convey any mystery or explanation about why the coast is deserted.  I'm relying upon the adjective portion of the place name to convey that information.

However, it occurs to me that perhaps I can use the noun portion of the place name to provide this meaning.  For example, I could call the coastline “Jason's Graveyard" and provide some of the same atmosphere as names like “The Forgotten Shores."  The noun I use has to have a negative connotation and designate a place, but it doesn't have to be explicitly linked to the coast, because the placement of the label should indicate to the reader that it is the coastline that is being labeled.  So something like “Graveyard" should work.  I could probably get a bit further afield with phrases like “Jason's Calamity" but that starts to sound too much like I'm labeling a specific event that happened in that location.

For the proper name part of this place name I use the existing fantasy name generator, to get names like “zum Nassir's Graveyard."  I can use the proper name by itself, but I can also add a title to the name (like “Commodore") to give it more of a naval feel, or I can use a noble's title (like “Baron") to imply that this area is famous and named because of a bad thing that happened to an important man here.

Obviously these names can get quite lengthy, so I'm going to have to go back and add some logic to shrink the size of the label when the name gets long.

But I don't have to use a proper name as the first part of this place name.  I can use a generic name, like “The Sailor's Graveyard."  (Note that I have to add “the" to the start of the place name when I'm using a generic noun.)  Here I'll want to use names related to sailing, such as “sailor," “mariner," “pirate," and so on to reinforce the image I'm trying to convey.

Here's a representative sample of the possible names:

The Colorless Coast
Retgres's Litten
The Uncounted Coast
The Cutthroat Coast
The Monstrous Bank
Commander Lozchem's Necropolis
The Weatherworn Coast
The Cryptic Bank
The Shipwrake Shore
The Hobgoblin Cliffs

I that makes a nice variety of names, but I'll continue to be on the look out for new possibilities.  (And if you have any ideas, please suggest them in the comments!)