Good mountain names describe what you see from a distance: a shape, a colour, a danger. Dragontooth Peak tells you it's sharp, Smokemaw that it's still smoking. This mountain name generator gives you fantasy peaks and ranges for your D&D maps, dwarven mountains, British bens, fells, tors and pikes, dark volcanoes and Japanese mountains with what their names mean, with a line of description if you want one.
Eight good mountain names
All eight came from the generator, across its styles:
- Heavenfang: a fantasy peak in one fierce word.
- The Storm-Lord's Ladder: a range with a legend built into it.
- Anviltooth: a dwarven mountain named after the forge.
- Mount Beldek, whose clans have feuded over its gold for centuries: a dwarven peak with a ready-made quarrel.
- Ben Garrach: a Scottish-style ben, from the Gaelic for mountain.
- Swine Scar: a northern English crag with a plain, farmyard name.
- Mount Vorthrax, whose smoke can be seen from three kingdoms: a volcano that's part of everyone's view.
- Kurokumo-dake: Japanese for "black cloud peak".
How real mountains got their names
Britain's hills carry words from every language spoken there:
- Ben comes from the Gaelic beinn, mountain, as in Ben Nevis.
- Pen is the Brittonic and Welsh word for head or top, as in Pen y Fan, and moel is Welsh for a bare hill.
- Fell comes from the Old Norse fjall, and is how hills are named across the Lake District and the Pennines.
- Tor, a rocky hilltop, is the word on Dartmoor, and pike means a peak in the north of England, as in Scafell Pike.
Some mountains have more than one name. Snowdon is the English "snow hill"; in Welsh it has always been Yr Wyddfa. In Japanese, yama means mountain and -take or -dake a peak, which is why the Japanese style gives you names like Suzume-dake, "sparrow peak", with the meaning alongside.
Choose Fantasy for peaks like The Lightningback Mountains, Dwarven for Mount Draldrin, British for fells and bens, or Volcanic for Burntop.
Mountains in your world
- Name the range and the peak. A range needs one name; its tallest peak deserves another.
- Ask who named it. Dwarves living inside a mountain will call it something different from the farmers below.
- Use the description as a reason to go there: a lost city under the snow, a single rope bridge, a treasury nobody has seen.
For what flows down from the peaks, try the River and Lake name generators. For the woods on the lower slopes, there's the Forest Name Generator, and for what's inside the mountain, the Cave Name Generator. To name the land around it, try the Kingdom Name Generator.
For more, see all the world-building name generators.