What you're looking at: A meaning is the English translation of the place name itself (e.g., "where the herring spawn"), not a locational descriptor. We deliberately don't include circular meanings like "colonial name of the bay" — if the meaning duplicates the location, it's omitted.

On click, each toponym shows: the name's meaning, the endonym (Indigenous name) for the language, the ISO 639-3 code, the source publication year and title with a link to the source, and a link to the Glottolog page for the language.

Source: Drawn from 6,845 toponyms across 23 languages. Not every source records a meaning for every toponym; some recorded meanings exist in our sources but aren't yet transcribed.