Naming Planets

[Saffy]

Hi, this is my first real post, which I hope is in the right place (please move it if not). Sorry if there is a thread like this, I'm new here and I did a bit of searching just in case.

what I wanted to ask was; has anyone got any suggestions on how to find or generate names for planets and other celestial stuff? I have thus far onely come up with "Arcadia" which is a country, I think, and Planet X.

thanks in advance for any suggestions
I hope I don't look like a numpty posting this

 

[thecommabandit]

I dunno if Arcadia is a country, but it's been used in at the very least one RPG (probably a bunch) so it may not be a good idea to call it that. The genre you're writing in is important, like I'm doing a sci-fi so I'm using the kind of names in the Halo universe - one of my planets is called "First Frontier" and another is called "Floe". If you're just going for a name name, then sanskrit dictionaries are useful. I usually look up a word vaguely to do with what I'm naming, then heavily corrupt a word that comes up until it fits in and sounds nice.

This is a good one.

 

[Nik]

Hi, is the namers' culture Terran ? If so, you have the constellation / catalogue names to start from...

eg Epsilon Indi. I had an hot, inner, face-locked planet, like a bigger, cooler Mercury. I called it 'Kalari', as a pun between Calorie and Kalahari. The twilight zone is, naturally, 'Libration Land'.

The second planet was a Mars analog, cold, dry and bleak, with a barren beauty. This, I named 'Trilorn'. The first settlement and de-facto capital was built underground to shelter from the weather. Whimsically, 'Bedrock'. The geo-stand station is 'Highball'.

A planet may be named for the catalogue (EpsIndi_2 ?) the discoverer, the discoverer's ship, pet, Mum, the date, a team member, the Sponsor, some incident, descriptive, sheer whimsy etc etc etc.

Or name it for the first landing / settlement ? Harper's Landing, perhaps, as the one he unexpectedly walked away from ? EastPort, because the second, smaller site was on the West of [fill in gap] etc...

An alien race would have its own constellations and names, I suppose you could do the same with them.

Also, I've seen a random name generator: Google will find it...

 

[Dave]

I quite like Larry Niven's names in his 'known universe'. They strike me as realistic names that real settlers might call a planet - 'We Made It', 'Canyon', 'Down', Jinx', Home', 'Wunderland'. You'd need to have read those books, but there are geographical and cultural influences there too, and if you are designing you own universe then your own characters would have their own too.

Otherwise, you could look at the historical naming of new continents, states and countries during the Age of Sail. You see places named after explorers, navigators and map-makers - America, Rhodesia, Tasmania, Jacksonville, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

Or else, you have places named for their economic resources - Argentina, Gold Coast, Ivory Coast, Salt Lake City, Buffalo.

Or else, you have places named after other places where the colonists cames from - New York, New Jersey, New Zealand, New South Wales, New Orleans.

 

[Sephiroth]

Arcadia was an ancient region of the Peloponnese, in Greece, and the word has taken on the proverbial meaning 'rural idyll'.

For a future 'real world', I like Dave's suggestions. I used to play Frontier on the PC, and that's how David Braben named a lot of his extra-terrestrial worlds/cities.

If it's not an 'Earth future', you can call them anything you like!

 

[gully_foyle]

I much prefer the mundane and ironic rather than grandiose, prosaic or un-pronouncable. So I agree with Dave. Our planets were named after Roman gods and mythological figures. If I was to get to name planets what would I name them? Colin, Eric and Carol? Or maybe biblical, old testament like David, Goliath (good for a gas giant), Abraham, Noah. Or new testament like John, Peter, Paul. Or pop culture, John, Paul, George and Ringo. Or political, Churchill, Bush (this one has a random orbit), Nixon.

btw, Dave, what was exported from Argentina?

 

[Sephiroth]

Silver (argentum).

 

[Saffy]

I knew Arcadia was a bad idea, I didn't like it that much anyway. Thanks for the suggestions!

 

[Ursa major]

In my universe, the stars are named after gods and the planets named after their star plus the number of the orbit. That's the official name. Then there's the name that the wider society knows it by; there are the names various locals use; there are nicknames. Look at Mars: Sol IV, the Red Planet.

While this means that you have to find a few more names, I think it makes a place more real. Think of the names of cities that we know little about; we know them by a single name, and unless something special has happened there, they might as well not exist. But those cities we do know about, they have lots of names: New York, the Big Apple, etc.; Los Angeles, LA, Lala Land; London, the Smoke (okay, that's a bit old fashioned, as is The Great Wen), the capital (for us here), and some names best not said in polite society o). Oh, and in a society with many languages, the names proliferate even more.

So while I agree with Dave about the less formal names (and if the places are below the radar of the authorities, the only names), in most cases there will be a formal name, etc.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

If it's Science Fiction, people off-planet might have one name for it,and the inhabitants another. Or the colonists one name and the natives (if any) another. The style of name would depend on whose viewpoint you are telling the story from.

If the characters are explorers, the name might be (as I think someone suggested) the star system and a number.

If they are settlers, then probably a name with some sort of earth reference, but that could be just about anything.

(In the past, settlers have very, very often named new places after old places, and they don't mind at all if there are already several places named after the first place. There are, for instance, something like a hundred different towns named Newark in the English speaking world. And the galaxy is a big place. If people went out in generation ships not expecting to have regular contact, or any contact, with other planets, many of them might choose to name their new homes Terra or some variation on Earth, just for the familiar sound of it -- only to learn, a hundred years later when someone invents FTL travel, that there are six, or ten, or thirty-two other planets with the same name.)

If your characters are natives, then you probably want something that sounds utterly exotic.

If it's Fantasy, again there might be more than one name, depending how many different languages are spoken in your invented world. And you may want to use an invented name (or names), or you might want to choose something familiar just because it will have certain associations for readers and help set the stage.

You may also consider that if the characters are not actually speaking an earth language and everything else in the story is presumably "in translation" you could translate the name of the world, too. So you could quite reasonably translate it as "Arcadia," if you were actually attached to the name, if the "real" one was supposed to mean "pastoral and idyllic" in the native tongue.

 

[CORONATIONCAGES]

i dont think there are any rules and it doesnt even have to be very deep one of my towns is called darhaven (a local old peoples home)!!!!