The Naming of Places (Part 7): On Point

Next up in place names are points -- fingers of land reaching out into the sea:

Right now points are given place names from combining an invented word with “Point."  Let's try to improve on that.

I'll start at the usual place and gather some data about how points are named in the real world.  To start with, the common synonyms for “Point":

Point: 12674
Bar: 1123
Neck: 732
Ledge: 702
Rock: 542
Reef: 524
Shoals: 482
Head: 179
Peninsula: 158
Bank: 155

Unlike the other place names I've looked at, the synonyms for “Point" don't have anything like a power law drop-off.  In this case, “Point" is used overwhelming, with only a few other synonyms showing up.  A few other true synonyms show up further down the list:  “Flat", and “Horn" primarily.  There are also a few mountain-ish nouns mixed in; I suspect this is because you also sometimes see a mountain or ridge named “Point".

Here are the common adjectives used to directly describe points:

Long: 233
Middle: 106
North: 101
Indian: 91
West: 75
East: 74
White: 55
Grassy: 36
Big: 35
Great: 35

These are also familiar from bays.  (“Indian" was actually also on the bays list, but I didn't use it for the obvious reason -- doesn't really work on a fantasy map!)  Not a lot of creativity here; most points get adjectives describing their size or location.

One interesting type of adjective I notice is country-related:  American, Spanish, French, etc.  Since I do name countries/regions on my maps, I could conceivable do this same thing.  It looks to me that the rules for creating a “country adjective" from a country name are pretty simple (although there are many exceptions).

Now let's look at the most common nouns used in naming points.

eagle: 83
saint: 71
sand: 70
bluff: 63
oak: 54
birch: 53
tree: 52
neck: 51
goose: 51
pine: 49

Again, like bays, “saint" is a surprisingly popular choice.  In fact, there's a lot of overlap between bays and points -- all ten of these nouns already appear in my name choices for bays.

Finally, let's look at the adjectives used to modify those names:

old: 68
big: 57
lower: 38
long: 37
upper: 34
white: 29
lone: 26
great: 25
black: 22
green: 21

There's a lot of overlap here with both the direct adjectives above as well as the similar adjectives from bays.

My overall conclusion -- which matches my intuition -- is that points get named in much the same way as bays.  It probably isn't a perfect match, but I should be able to reuse most of the naming rules from bays for points.

There are a few bay-naming rules that don't work for points.  Most are just bay-specific vocabulary, like “Deep," but a more complex rule is the one that names a bay after a river that flows into the bay.  This doesn't make any sense for points (which at any rate rarely have rivers).  An alternate rule that does make sense is to name a point after a nearby bay.

On the left side of this map, the bay has been named after the city and the point has in turn been named for the bay.  (!) On the other side of the map, the point has been named directly after the city that is out on the point.

As is often the case, working on this surfaced a number of bugs in the point creation code.  For example:

I'm not sure what I think of naming geographical features after a Chicken Butcher, but the real problem here is the two co-named bays are too far apart.  I also found a number of problems where bays (and points) weren't being detected properly, and some cases where I thought there should be a bay and there wasn't.  I also added in some limits on the number of bays and points that can show up on a map.

I've fixed those, but there are probably still other tweaks I'll have to make for point names.  I'll deal with those as I see problems arise.