Dan Hon recently trained a neural net to generate a list of fictional British placenames. The process is fairly simple…you train a program on a real list of placenames and it “brainstorms” new names based on patterns it found in the training list. As Hon says, “the results were predictable”…and often hilarious. Here are some of my favorites from his list:

Heaton on Westom

Brumlington

Stoke of Inch

Batchington Crunnerton

Salt, Earth

Wallow Manworth

Crisklethe’s Chorn

Ponkham Bark

Buchlingtomptop

Broad Romble

Fuckley

See also auto-generated maps of fantasy worlds.

Update: Tom Taylor did a similar thing last year using Tensorflow. Here are a few of his fictional names:

Allers Bottom

Hendrelds Hill

St Ninhope

Up Maling

Firley Dinch

There’s also an associated Twitter bot. (via @philgyford)

Also, Dan Connolly had a look at the etymology of the names on Hon’s list.