What should I name my world?

Sometimes when I am stuck for a name, I write down a bunch of root words and mix and match them.

For me, the names either come easy, or finding the right one drives me crazy. Once I was working on a novel length story, and I got so tired of naming mountains, and streams, and cities, and countries, that I had one of my characters remark on it.

He read the sign over an inn, shook his head, and quipped, "Who names these places?"
It probably won't stay, but at the time it amused me to have one of my characters mock my agony.

That's funny, I had to do this a few days ago too, in order to keep the places in the story I was plotting straight. Some of the names made sense, other ones I know I have to go back and change later. Most names are just placeholders right now, because constantly referring to them as "That place with the volcano" and "place where MC gets his ass royally kicked" just doesn't work. =/

Lately I've been picking a few letters that look good together and playing with them until I get something pronounceable. Me personally it always bothers me when the name just doesn't LOOK right. I'm not sure how effective this is yet.

IIRC, the vast majority of the words for places translate to "home" or "our place" or some such. Or so I was told.

My question is: Who's naming it? If it's the people who live there--what would they call it? If it's someone else, look at the style of naming from the culture they're from (i.e.: Pandora in "Avatar"--they have to open the planet to get the stuff they want, but it's got its dangers--but that name came from humans, not the natives).

Names reflect the culture that bestowed them. Start there and maybe it'll be easier.

You should name it after yourself

Davidia is not bad actually...

Look up an Australian aborigine word for 'home' or 'cave' or something similar and start messing with it...

I've just stumbled across a weird problem that I didn't quite anticipate with my WIP--I have four parallel worlds, all pretty much Earth, but different from each other in subtle ways. The thing is it used to be one world, but then there was a "Disaster" that ripped apart the time-space continuum, so now there are all these different worlds that popped up on account of the paradox. What I'm trying to decide is, since these worlds all started as our world at present, do I need to come up with different names for the countries and cities in all the parallel worlds? Sorry if that's confusing--it's just something I've been thinking about.

I don't think it would be logical to have different names if they were once the same place. The only places that would change name would be ones where it happened naturally within their reality. The only problem, though, is that this (having the same names in each different place) can be VERY confusing to readers...

knight_tour said:

I don't think it would be logical to have different names if they were once the same place. The only places that would change name would be ones where it happened naturally within their reality. The only problem, though, is that this (having the same names in each different place) can be VERY confusing to readers...

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What Knight Tour said. Different names would only be logical for places that were named AFTER the split occurred. And even then, it depends on how severely history changed, and whether those changes would affect the naming.

Of course, you could have a situation where people familiar with the different parallel worlds could come up with their own nomenclature (For example, there's Paris Prime and Paris Beta, or Australia 3. Etc. etc.

What I'm trying to figure out for my own WIP is I'm not sure if the kingdoms I have mapped out are the entirety of the world, or are just a single continent, so I'm not sure what to name the overall world. The map just goes off to the west and I'm not sure if it just ends or what. I'd feel weird naming the world without being certain that it *is* the entirety of the world.

Not that it's important to the story, because none of the characters are thinking in such global terms. But it's something I'd like to know for my own reference.

Etola said:

Of course, you could have a situation where people familiar with the different parallel worlds could come up with their own nomenclature (For example, there's Paris Prime and Paris Beta, or Australia 3. Etc. etc.

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Oooh, I like this idea. That makes a lot of sense, actually, because my characters are all aware of the different worlds and can travel between them. Thanks a lot, both of you!