The Naming of Places (Part 11): Regions, Rivers and Islands

If you've read the previous ten parts of this series, you probably have a pretty good sense of my naming approach at this point.  So I'm just going to summarize and hit the highlights for naming regions, rivers and islands.

The Dragons Abound maps are divided up into regions but I've been purposely vague about what these regions represent.  The Dragons Abound maps are “regional" meaning (roughly) smaller than a continent, so these regions could represent countries or they could be some smaller subdivisions of a country, like states or dukedoms, etc.  I'd like to have the option to name regions as countries, as parts within a country, or ambiguously.

In the real world, most country names have been around for a long time.  Even if they were originally descriptive, we now treat them as proper names, e.g., the Netherlands is literally “the Low Lands" but we just think of that as a name.  There are a number of suffixes that signify a country name, such as “-land" (e.g., England, Ireland, Holland, etc.) and “-ia" (e.g., Albania, Slovakia and the related Germany, Hungary, etc.).  There are also some countries like “The United States of America" that have political descriptive names.  A straightforward approach to naming regions as countries is to generate a proper name with a country suffix.  I can use Martin O'Leary's original name generator to create the proper name, and then just tack on a suffix.  That gets me names like these:

Klinland
Mintripland
Shaminia
Tripchia
Duland
Lilinia
Putitia
Shaland
Tluntaimland
Plishia

As usual, Martin's generator creates the occasional tongue-twister (“Tluntaim"?) but overall this produces pretty acceptable country names.

Let's move on to naming islands.  In English, the synonyms for “island" aren't used very frequently.  In my corpus:

island: 20459
rock: 1800
islands: 1169
key: 922
rocks: 320
ledge: 178
keys: 165
isle: 118
towhead: 115
atoll: 90
islet: 50
holm: 43
islets: 38
cay: 36
bar: 34
head: 32
tump: 26
isles: 18
lump: 14
nubble: 12
lumps: 12

Some of these are pretty specialized words.  A “towhead" is “A sandbar or low-lying alluvial island in a river, especially one with a stand of trees."  Still, I can probably use these occasionally.

The actual names of islands overlap extensively with the names of bays and points; like those objects they have characteristics of both land and sea.  Looking at some of the names listed in my corpus of real world island names shows all the usual suspects:

Aaron Island
Abalone Island
Abbess Island
Abbey Island
Abbot Rock
Abernethy Island
Abnecotants Island
Abraham Islet
Acorn Rock

You have people's names, names of sea creatures, titles, etc.  (Note “Abnecotants" which I probably would have rejected as awkward and unbelievable if it was generated.)  Looking at the adjectives used in real-world island names shows many of the same adjectives I already have for bays and points:

big: 401
long: 184
black: 139
green: 131
middle: 129
great: 105
white: 104
round: 91
outer: 63
old: 62
upper: 59
grassy: 55
lower: 55
inner: 52
flat: 51
lone: 47
high: 45
brown: 34
blue: 34
sandy: 33

Lots of physical descriptors, colors, and features.  I'll add all the specific adjectives and nouns from my corpus to the same general rules as naming points and bays.  That gives me names like these:

Meyo Island
Sea Urchin Island
Tight Island
Gul Nubble
Gobu Rock
Neler Island
Holy Island
Te Island
Heavenly Key
Se Island

These names also go through the rules for modification.  In this case “Gul Nubble" was originally “Gull Nubble" and “Neler Island" was shortened from “Nedeller Island."

The first thing to notice about river names is that there are a *lot* of them in my corpus.  There are about 233,000 named rivers in the U.S. in one of my sources.  And many synonyms for rivers:

creek: 182794
branch: 51903
brook: 17379
river: 14006
fork: 6861
slough: 4285
bayou: 4002
wash: 3811
stream: 1942
drain: 1815
swamp: 1328
arroyo: 639
bottom: 531
gut: 438
prong: 411
ditch: 395
outlet: 251
water: 237
chute: 208
gully: 205
cutoff: 171
inlet: 167
coulee: 159
hole: 139
bottoms: 119
channel: 103
elbow: 87
cut-off: 84
pup: 73
brake: 67
gulch: 50
slu: 49
beck: 38
swale: 27
canal: 26
stringer: 25
head: 24

There are a few synonyms in that list that are new to me.  “Pup" is an interesting one -- the definition of pup as a stream doesn't appear in any of the online dictionaries I checked, but it is clearly used that way in my corpus of names.

One thing to note about this list is that most of these synonyms refer to smaller rivers.  Depending on the scale of a map, these smaller rivers might not even appear on the map.  So the distributions here can't be blindly used; probably on my maps almost every river that gets labeled should be a “river."  But it does suggest that I could label rivers based upon length and use the “creek" synonyms for the shorter ones.

Taking a look at a selection of river names you see the typical types of names:

Babmore Branch
Babocomari River
Baboon Creek
Baboosic Brook
Baboquivari Wash
Babs Branch
Baby Creek
Baby King Creek
Baby Wagon Creek
Babyfoot Creek
Babyhead Creek

Note that there are a couple of tongue-twister names.  With “Baby", you see exactly the sort of name formations I've done previously -- the word as a single adjective (“Baby Creek"), as an adjective with a noun (“Baby King Creek"), and then with the two compressed together (“Babyfoot Creek").

An interesting question is whether the names of the larger rivers follow a different pattern than the names of the smaller rivers.  We might expect the smaller rivers to have more adventurous names.  Here are the first 20 rivers that start with B:

Babel River
Babocomari River
Back Fork Elk River
Back River
Bad Axe River
Bad River
Bagaduce River
Baker Branch Saint John River
Baker River
Bald River
Baldwin River
Ball Club River
Ballinderry River
Ballybannan River
Ballygomartin River
Baltimore River
Banister River
Bannahassee River
Bantam River
Baptism River

There are still a variety of names here, but it does tend more towards proper names (e.g., “Baltimore") than descriptive names (e.g., “Bad Axe"), and that's what I observe in general for river names.

The adjectives have the usual mix of physical descriptors, colors, and features:

big: 4345
dry: 3248
middle: 2950
long: 1713
black: 1322
white: 1216
rocky: 1058
red: 1026
right: 1011
hollow: 974
sandy: 897
clear: 889
flat: 862
old: 789
crooked: 754
blue: 733
upper: 704
deep: 691
brushy: 667
lower: 633

Not unsurprisingly, the water adjectives (e.g., “clear", “deep") are used for rivers.  So the names of rivers ends up looking a lot like the names of bays, although I use a different distribution of the types of names for rivers and creeks:

Mimigon River
Gongoe River
(Shortened Gonsliggoe to Gongoe)
Gamslig River
Ideal River
Galon River
(Shortened Galleon to Galon)
Billet River
Bagnio River
Salvation River
Thole River
Shosligglog River

Pabo's Branch
Frosty Frog Creek
Sapphire Creek
Wild Brook
Chainmaker's Creek
Thegian Gloggo's Creek
(Shortened Theologian to Thegian)
Gomomnog Creek
Plolpot Creek
Mioer's Creek
Gloggo's Creek

You can see that the rivers have a lot of proper names, while the creeks have more descriptive names.  The shortening rules have also kicked in to twist a few names.

Finally (finally!) here's an example map with all new name invention (click through for larger version):

This is a map with a lot of labels and some label placement challenges, but overall I think this is pretty good.  There are a number of very nice names on the map -- Oyster Inlet, Drydock Point, Steinston, Riverwood, Pitsville / Old Pitsville, etc.  There are a few clunkers -- I don't particularly like Nunse Village or Roderle, but they're not so terrible they ruin the map.

I've been working a bit on improving the placement of river labels, and the river label placements on this map are very good except for Logrhead River in the lower right that overlaps the city icon (and comes between the icon and the city name).  As far as the rest of the labeling goes, the top of the map is too busy, and a human labeler would probably have moved Ketlom Island to the bottom of the island (where it would connect better with the namesake Ketlom city as well).  It might be worth considering a heuristic that checks how dense the labels are in an area and eliminates some of the minor labels if it is too dense.  But the placement of the ocean illustration is perfect.

By the way, the map above is a random invented style.  Here's the same map in a more traditional fantasy style, and with different names as a result:

A nice thing on this map is that you get a little sense of the “native" language in the names like Dukbip, Blibduk and Blibton.  And I love the way the tall snow-covered mountain at the bottom is in front of the border line.  I don't think I've ever seen that happen before, but it's a great effect.