People naming things in Australia:

• Townsville
• Western Australia
• Shark bay
• Great Sandy Desert
• Little Sandy Desert
• Snowy Mountains

But you also have wildcards:

• Tasmania (not actually a mental illness)
• Monkey Mia (There are no monkeys, and nobody named Mia)
• Lake disappointment (contains no water)
• Blue mountains (they are mostly green)
• King Island (we don't recognise its claim to the throne)

Fun fact: Celts were originally central European, but the British Isles and Brittany were the only places Celtic culture survived the Romans.

Reminds of the old story that I heard (unsure if it's true or not) about Torpenhow Hill in the UK.

Over centuries... various invaders and conquerors had come to that place and asked what it was called... First it was called Tor later on invaders added the word 'Pen' which was their word for Hill... later, more invaders came along and added the suffix 'How' which was their word for Hill.... and finally... it was named in more modern English as Torpenhow Hill.... which literally translates as Hill, Hill, Hill, Hill.

I don;t know if that's 100% true or not... but it's an amusing little story and given the oddities of the English language... I'd like to think it was.

Especially given there's a species of bear out there that's name is literally translated as Bear, Bear, Bear.

If only I had the self-confidence of the guy who went to Australia and said "this place is called New South Wales now."

Reminds me of

Torpenhow Hill is a hill in Cumbria, England. Its name consists of the Old English ‘Tor’, the Welsh ‘Pen’, and the Danish ‘How’ - all of which translate to modern English as ‘Hill’. Therefore, Torpenhow Hill would translate as hill-hill-hill hill

Fantasy world names: scadrial, Pallimustus, Vulcan, Tatoine

Real planet names by locals: Dirt

One wonders how many inhabited planets in the universe are referred to by the locals as "Dirt."

My d&d game tends to work better when I just name things like “The Nightmare Wood” and “The Old Hills”. The simplicity somehow lands harder.

Yer da sells Avon.

Naming my main character "Alexander" and every time I visit a city I tell the DM to refer to it as "Alexandria" going forward.

Half the smaller villages in southern Germany are named "Ried" which comes from reed and roughly means "swampy place". The other half uses some variation of the suffix "-höfen" which just means "this place consists of farms" 😂

Fun fact: copper got its roman name because the main exporter of that good in ye classic times was the island of Cyprus (Kyprus, cuprum)

Istanbul is literally "to the city" or in a way just "the city"

In my group if the GM can't pronounce the name in one try in a way that makes it clear to us how to spell it the players with rename it something more like "Bonertown" or just "Dave"

I grew up in a village whose name roughly translates to "Bob's place by the stream."

Fun fact in hungary there are no two towns with the same name. Or at least thats what everyone seems to say and to be fair i havent found a single pair yet so im pretty sure its true. Quite a neat thing actually, if you tell the name of even a small town to someone, they should be able to find it. And because hungarian has its unique characters and structures its quite likely that its the only place on earth named that.

Oh and the Newtown.

According to USPS, there are 32 towns in the US named Franklin. lol

Alaskan settlers wanted to call their new town Ptarmigan cause there were plenty of those birds around.
But they didn't know how to spell it, so they called it Chicken.

There is an urban legend that when the Swedish map makers came to Finland the locals would mess with them when asked what a pace was called and that is why so many place names have “vittu” or “perse” etc. in them.