Continent Name Generator

How our continents got their names

The names of Earth’s continents are mostly Greek and Latin, and each one comes from a different kind of source:

• Europe and Asia are Greek names, used for the lands on either side of the Aegean long before anyone knew how far they went.
• Africa was the name of a Roman province in what is now Tunisia, later stretched to the whole continent.
• America comes from the Latin form of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, made feminine to match Europa and Asia on a 1507 map.
• Australia is Latin terra australis, “southern land”, a continent imagined before it was found.
• Antarctica is Greek for “opposite the Arctic”, and Arctic comes from arktos, the bear, the northern constellation.

So a continent can be named after a region, a person, a direction or a guess. The generator offers each of these as a style.

Fantasy continent names by style

Classical names

A root plus a land ending. In Latin that means -ia, -ica or -ea, names that read like an old map, as if scholars had argued about them for centuries. Other cultures keep their own land words: Norse -heim and -gard, Elven -ethiel and -vanthe, Dwarven -karak, Sylvan -weald.

Names from winds and directions

The ancient Greeks named the winds and the directions they blew from. The generator turns those into continent names. Because the roots are Greek and Latin, the Any style only uses them for the Latin culture; pick this style to use them with any culture.

• Bor- from Boreas, the north wind
• Austr- from Latin auster, the south wind
• Zephyr- from Zephyros, the west wind
• Eur- from Euros, the east wind
• Orient- and Occid- from Latin for the rising and setting sun, east and west
• Merid- from Latin meridies, midday, the south

A continent named for a direction tells the reader where the namers stood. Zephyria is the land in the west, seen from somewhere else.

Descriptive names

People rarely use a continent’s formal name in daily speech. Sailors and soldiers say “the Shattered Lands” or “the Frozen Waste”. Choose “Descriptive” to get names like these, or keep them as a second name next to a classical one.

Tips for naming continents

• Decide who named it. The name of a continent often comes from outsiders, not the people who live there.
• Keep the land endings for the big pieces. If every kingdom ends in -ia, the continent should not, or the map gets confusing.
• Think about deep time. Earth’s ancient supercontinents got modern scholarly names: Pangaea is Greek for “all the earth”, and Gondwana is named after a region of India. A long-lost landmass in your world can get the same treatment.

Example continent names