Village names

A village name in this generator is one head word and one hamlet ending: Greyby, Millcombe, Wyndwick. The frame is small enough to count exactly, so this page counts it — all 324 names the tables can make, the draw where the supply runs out, and the region size at which two villages start sharing one.

Fifty village names from the run

• Greyby
• Willowby
• Oakby
• Silverby
• Moorthorpe
• Oakworth
• Elmham
• Saltby
• Redby
• Wyndwick
• Northworth
• Coldthorpe
• Marrowcombe
• Thornby
• Ashwick
• Yewcot
• Stormcombe
• Brambleham
• Fenby
• Silverham
• Windworth
• Westwick
• Thornwick
• Greywick
• Longby
• Highcombe
• Highby
• Ashby
• Ironstead
• Ironcombe
• Deepworth
• Longthorpe
• Harrowstead
• Fenstead
• Crowcombe
• Deepstead
• Stormthorpe
• Kingswick
• Oldham
• Greycombe
• Blackcot
• Woldcombe
• Moorham
• Longstead
• Woldcot
• Millham
• Thorncombe
• Kingscot
• Windham
• Elmby

Seed 20261024, village mode, human lands, duplicate guard on so the batch holds no repeats. The other hundred and fifty names sit in the checked table at the bottom of this page, each with its two parts spelled out.

Three hundred and twenty-four names, and then nothing new

Forty-four heads times eight endings is 352 pairs. The join rules throw out 28 before any name is drawn: no head that repeats its ending, no three-letter head in front of a six-letter ending, no -th seam, no head whose last letter is the ending's first letter, and no tripled letter. What survives is 324 names — a closed set. Drawing from it for long enough is not a matter of taste; it is a matter of how many draws the set holds.

10,000 draws at seed 20261024 returned 324 different names, which is the whole bank: 100.0% of it. The first thousand draws produced 311 of them, the second thousand 11, draws 2,001 to 5,000 produced 2, and draws 5,001 to 10,000 produced 0. By draw 1,000 the page had 311 names, by 2,500 it had 323, and by 5,000 it had 324: the well is not deep, it is just wide enough to look deep for ten minutes.

This is the opposite shape to the tavern page, where 10,000 draws still found new signs because the pool was 8,948. Here the pool is 324, so the tenth village you name has a real chance of repeating the second: in the ten-village regions below, 12.4% already contain a duplicate full name.

One ending is a family of thirty-one to forty-four names

Pick the ending first and the size of the choice is known before you draw. -cot, -by and -combe each take all 44 heads. -thorpe takes 31, because it is six letters long and the join rule refuses a three-letter head in front of it: Ash, Dun, Elm, Fen, Oak, Old, Red and Yew all fail there, and East, West and Salt fail on the t while Heath and North fail on the th. No other ending loses more than five heads, and three lose none.

The 2,000-draw runs per ending came back at exactly the reachable count every time — 39 for -wick, 44 for -cot, 43 for -stead, 31 for -thorpe, 44 for -by, 44 for -combe, 40 for -ham, 39 for -worth. Nothing in a family is unreachable, and 2,000 draws is more than enough to empty one: the median trial needed 116 to 180 draws to see every head its ending can take. That is the practical unit of this table — not the 324-name bank, but an ending family of 31 to 44, which one careful pass over a map will exhaust.

Forty villages, twenty-six heads

The head is the half that gets reused, and on a regional map that is the half people notice. Forty villages drawn independently from the human table gave a mean of 26.3 different heads out of 44, which means 13.7 heads were carrying more than one village; every one of the 4,000 regions had at least one repeated head, and 92.7% had a repeated full name. At twenty villages the full-name repeat rate is 44.1%, at thirty 76.2%, at sixty 99.7%.

There is also a hard ceiling worth knowing before the numbers: 44 heads cannot give 45 villages that all sound different. Once a region passes twenty or so, the useful move is not another draw — it is a qualifier (Ashwick on the Moor, Ashwick Low), a second culture's ending table, or a second element taken from the terrain the village sits on. The generator will happily keep drawing; it just cannot keep being new.

Twenty villages is the last comfortable size: below it a full-name repeat is a minority outcome, above it a duplicate is the normal case. The head count argues the same way from the other side — a region of sixty villages averages 32.8 distinct heads out of the 44 that exist, so nearly a third of its settlements are named after a feature another settlement already took.

The village table is not a clean break from the town table

The same seed through the town tier gives 308 distinct names in 10,000 draws, a mean of 8.45 letters against 8.39 for villages, and a median of 8 in both. The tiers are the same size and the same shape; what separates them is three endings. The village row keeps wick, by, thorpe, ham and worth from the town row, drops -ton, -ford and -thwaite, and adds -cot, -stead and -combe.

So 193 of the 308 town names from that run (62.7%) are also valid village names. If the difference matters at your table — a village should not read like a market town — the ending is the only lever that moves it, and it moves a bit less than half the strings. This is also why the two pages exist separately rather than as one: the string is nearly the same, the question is not. A town name has to carry a market and a wall; a village name has to survive being said as a direction ("two miles past Millcombe").

Using these at the table

• Pick the ending before the name. -thorpe and -stead read as a farm with a family in it; -wick implies a trade that is not farming. Choice of ending does more work than choice of head, and it is the one choice with a hard size attached.
• Twenty per culture, then stop. Below twenty villages a duplicate name is a minority outcome (12.4% at ten, 44.1% at twenty); past it you are rolling for a collision. If the region needs forty, split it across two cultures or add a qualifier.
• Reuse heads on purpose. Two villages sharing a head is not a mistake — it is how a region reads as a region. What should never repeat is the full name, and that is the column the table above tracks.

Questions this page answers

Two hundred names, each one checked

Most village-name pages hand over a list and stop there. The difference here is not that there are two hundred of them — it is that every one can be checked. Each row below carries four things: whether the matching .com is registered, read live from Verisign's RDAP service; whether the Forgotten Realms wiki has a page for that exact name; which of the 44 heads and which of the eight endings the name is built from; and one line on what it sounds like and who it suits.

The registrations came back 149 taken and 51 free out of 200 on 2026-10-24, with none left unread. The wiki column came back empty for all 200: the API reports no page for any generated name. That is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up — the same checker resolves Elminster, Daggerford and Oakvale in one call, so the blank column is what the tables produce, not a failed request. Names built from an ash tree and a cottage ending are exactly what the wiki does not have pages for, which is the reason to generate them instead of borrowing.

The 200 use all 44 heads and all eight endings. Long, Deep and Wold carry seven names each, -by carries 29 of the 200 — the shortlist is a slice of the same distribution the 10,000-draw run measured, not a curated list.

Reproduce this page

var s=document.createElement('script'); s.src='/assets/village-stats.js'; document.body.appendChild(s);

The script draws through the site's own makeVillageName and makeTownName, so the head pool, the ending table and the join rules are the shipped ones. Parameters: seed 20261024, 10,000 draws, 2,000 draws per ending, 500 trials per ending, 4,000 regions at 10/20/30/40/60 villages, and a 200-name shortlist. It leaves its output on window.__VILLAGE_STATS. The RDAP and wiki columns were read separately on 2026-10-24 and are not part of that script.

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