How do you name your World? (Or nations, etc., for that matter...)

[keirdubois]

So... I've been thinking the past few days, since I posted the latest update to my "unnamed" project
How do you come up with the names for your worlds, nations, whatever? Why? Do those names mean anything to you, or to the people who populate your world? What does it mean, and why?

I've gone through years and years of several iterations of names with made-up words that had no logic to them, which I don't prefer to do anymore. I want to find some happy medium between the slog of making up entirely new fictional languages (Tolkein), which I'm not qualified to do, vs using English for "western" stuff and made up "exotic" names for "everything else" (GRR Martin), which seems too simplistic but alternately kinda accessible for lay audiences?

I'm currently sorta retconning/making up stuff that has some(?) logic(?), such as a region with medieval Iberian-style culture, called "The Orangelands" by outsiders but "Naran" by the native culture ("Naransi"). Naran being a diluted/derivative of the Spanish naranja. I've done the same for a Celtic-ish island chain called The Green Jewels, which ended up being "Glaseodae" which (if I remember right) is a corruption of something similar in either Irish or Scottish Gaelic.

I've been doing that thing with names where the English name is large and the fictional name is smaller/underneath it, but I'm thinking about reversing that. I don't feel like a detail freak about this stuff—I'm not the linguist (or, really, the hard-core fantasist or gamer) in my family—but honestly seeing the simple Westerosi place-names was kinda liberating for me. I don't want to create something that's a turnoff because of illogical or weak names.

[seusomon]

I know this is a really old thread, but...

The inhabitants of a world will likely only name it if they have a concept of other worlds from which it needs to be distinguished. On Earth, this mostly awaited the advent of scientific astronomy, when the planets were recognized as being other worlds. The Germanic "Middle Earth" which Tolkien used referred to it being between the world of the gods and the underworld. Latin "Terra" was not used as the name of the World: I've never seen a world map with this title. Instead, most old maps in Latin were titled "Orbis Terrarum" (Globe of Lands) or some variation. Greek Gaia was a personification of Earth as contrasted with Sea and Sky, not the name of the World as a whole.

So if you need an endonym for the world itself, you first need to ask about the cosmology of its inhabitants, and why they would think of the world as one of several.