Planet Name Generator
Looking for a planet name generator that covers more than one register? This one mixes four real naming traditions: clipped astronomical designations in the style real exoplanet catalogs use, invented compound names built from name-like syllable pairs, descriptive names built around a world's terrain, and single-word mythic names for legendary worlds. Generate ten planet names, keep the one that fits your system.
How Planet Names Actually Work
Fictional planet names generally fall into four families, and this generator draws from all of them so a batch of results never feels repetitive. The first is the designation register: a short prefix or catalog code plus a number, sometimes with a trailing lowercase letter, like Kepler-452b or HD-40307. Real astronomers actually name exoplanets this way — the letter after the number marks the order a planet was confirmed around its host star, with "b" going to the first one found — and hard sci-fi borrows the format because it reads as plausibly scientific at a glance.
The second family is the invented compound name: two name-like fragments joined into a single word, such as Zephyra or Voranth. These read as "a place with its own history" without needing any explanation, which is why they show up constantly in space opera and tabletop settings where a planet needs to feel lived-in rather than freshly surveyed.
The third is descriptive, pairing an adjective with a geographic-sounding noun — Crimson Expanse, The Frozen Reach — the same logic real explorers used when they named coastlines after what the coastline looked like. The fourth is the mythic single word, a name with no visible parts at all, like Thalor or Aurelith, reserved in most fiction for a homeworld, a capital, or a planet important enough that nobody needs to explain where the name came from.
Example Planet Names
- Kepler-186f
- HD-1649
- K-42
- WASP-247b
- Zephyra
- Voranth III
- The Crimson Expanse
- Frozen Reach
- The Ashen Wastes
- Thalor
- New Aurelith
- Obsidian-93
Who Uses a Planet Name Generator
Tabletop GMs running Traveller, Starfinder, or a homebrew sci-fi campaign use it to fill in a star map on the fly, when players jump to a system nobody planned for. Novelists and screenwriters lean on it to seed an entire sector without every world sounding like it came from the same naming logic — a clipped designation for an unsettled gas giant, a mythic single word for the ancient homeworld everyone in the story already knows by name. It pairs naturally with a spaceship name generator for naming the ships that travel between these worlds, or an alien name generator for the species that live on them.
Indie game developers use it to populate procedurally generated galaxies with planet names that read as authored rather than randomly assembled, and worldbuilders use the four registers the way real cartographers used naming conventions: as a shortcut into a whole setting's history. A system where every rock still carries its scientific survey code tells a different story than one where every world has already been renamed by the people who settled there.
Building a Coherent Star System
The cleanest way to make a fictional system feel real is to let a planet's name track its story rather than picking randomly. An unexplored or newly surveyed world keeps its designation code because nobody has bothered to rename it yet; a colonized world earns a descriptive or compound name once people actually live there; and a single mythic word gets reserved for the one planet — usually a homeworld or a lost capital — important enough that the whole story assumes you already know what it means.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do astronomers actually name real exoplanets?
Real exoplanets are named after the discovery survey or telescope plus a number, then a lowercase letter marking discovery order around that star — Kepler-452b, for instance, is the first confirmed planet ("b") around the star Kepler-452, discovered by the Kepler space telescope. The host star itself is implicitly "a." This generator's designation-style results follow that same real convention, which is why they read as scientifically plausible rather than made up.
What's a good naming convention for a fictional star system?
Pick one register per category of world instead of mixing all four everywhere. Give unsettled or newly surveyed planets plain designation codes, let colonized worlds carry a descriptive or compound name chosen by their settlers, and save a mythic single-word name for the one planet — a homeworld, a lost capital, a legendary ruin — that the whole story treats as already famous.
How do I make up a planet name that sounds mythic instead of scientific?
Drop the numbers and prefixes entirely and aim for a single unbroken word with no visible parts, the way real myth-derived place names read: Thalor, Aurelith, Voranth. A mythic planet name works best when it can't obviously be taken apart into an adjective and a noun — that's what makes it feel ancient rather than assembled.
Should a planet have both a designation code and a real name in my story?
Often, yes, and the gap between the two can do storytelling work. A world might carry a cold catalog code like TOI-1649 in survey records while everyone who actually lives there calls it by a name their ancestors chose — and a character using the designation instead of the local name can quietly signal that they're an outsider, a bureaucrat, or someone who's never set foot on the ground.
