Street Name Generator

How street names really work

A street name is almost always two things: a name and a type. The name says what you would find there or who lived there. The type says what kind of way it is. Change either half and the whole street changes character: Tanners Row smells of the leather yards, Tanners Close is a dark alley behind them, and Elmwood Drive belongs to another century.

This generator builds both halves separately, so you can fix the type and vary the name, or the other way round. Every result tells you where each part comes from.

Medieval street names

Medieval towns named streets after what happened in them. The City of London still has Bread Street, Milk Street and Ironmonger Lane. Pick “A trade or guild” to get names like these:

• Trades: tanners, coopers (barrel makers), fletchers (arrow makers), chandlers (candle makers), mercers (cloth merchants), cordwainers (shoemakers working fine Cordovan leather), fullers, dyers, vintners.
• Landmarks: the church, the castle, the mill, the bridge, the market, the guildhall, the gallows hill, the barbican outside the main gate.
• Places and families: the road to the next village often took its name, so you get streets like Bradley Road.

York’s Shambles takes its name from the benches where butchers sold meat. Details like that make a fantasy city feel lived in, and they cost one word.

Fantasy street names by culture

Set “Setting” to “In the chosen culture” and the generator switches to the street-naming habits of that culture:

• Norse: one word ending in -gate, from Old Norse gata “street”, as in Kirkgate “church street”.
• Latin: Via plus an adjective or a place word, as in Via Alba “the white road”.
• Celtic: a Gaelic or Welsh place name with a Scots street type, as in Kilduff Wynd.
• Elven and Dwarven: invented street words with fixed meanings, -vell “path” and -stav “tunnel road”.
• Sylvan: woodland names with Path, for villages in a forest.

Street types and what they mean

Need a list for a city chase? Print a d100 table of street names. The type is the quickest way to signal age and wealth. Old towns have lanes, rows, wynds and alleys. Later towns add squares, terraces and crescents. Modern suburbs are full of drives, closes and groves.

• Street: from Old English strǣt, which came from Latin strāta, a paved Roman road.
• Row: a row of houses, often one trade side by side.
• Wynd, close and vennel: Scots words for narrow lanes and alleys. Vennel comes from French venelle.
• Mews: originally the royal mews where the king’s hawks were kept while they moulted, later a lane of stables, now small houses.
• Crescent: a curved row of houses, from Latin crescere, “to grow”, the shape of a growing moon.

Modern street names

For a present-day or near-future setting, choose “Modern town”. You will get the familiar mix of trees (Linden Grove), landmarks (Station Road) and names borrowed from places and families (Ashworth Avenue). Most real streets are this ordinary, which is why they work for grounded fiction.

Example street names