3,981 settlements that Wikidata says are named after another place, from Boston in Massachusetts to New Delhi and a Paris on a Pacific atoll, each joined by a line to the place that lent it a name. What they were named after, how far the names travelled, and who gave names to whom.
Some place names are borrowed. Settlers, soldiers, refugees and town planners carried the names of home with them, so that Boston in Lincolnshire has a far bigger namesake in Massachusetts, and Perth in Scotland a far bigger one in Western Australia. Many more borrowings are quieter: a village named after the river it stands on, or a new suburb named after the old one up the road.
Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, records some of this in a property called "named after". I took every settlement that it says is named after another geographical place, 7,666 links before cleaning, dropped the census areas, camps, stations and other entries that are not settlements in the ordinary sense, and kept 3,981 links from 3,837 places to 3,551 namesakes. Each line on the map runs from the namesake to the place named after it. Click a line, a place or a namesake to see its whole family.
Lines: great circles from the namesake to the place, coloured by where the namesake is. Rings: namesakes, sized by how many places are named after them. Dots: the places. Rivers, regions and mountain ranges are drawn at the single point Wikidata gives for them, so their lines are approximate. Source: Wikidata "named after" (P138), CC0, queried with QLever in 2026. Outlines: Natural Earth.
Only 37% of the links (1,484) are to another settlement. The rest are to the landscape: 570 to rivers and streams, 298 to mountains and hills, 254 to lakes and seas, 235 to regions and countries, and the rest to bays, islands, castles, forts, stations, streets and parks. Counting rivers, mountains, lakes, coasts, forests and valleys together, 38% of the names come from nature.
What places are named after, and how far away it is
Links by the kind of namesake (bars) and the median distance from namesake to place (right). Hover a bar.
The kind of namesake decides the distance. A place named after a mountain or a hill is a median 2.4 km from it, and after a river 12.8 km (measured to Wikidata's single point for the river). A place named after another settlement is a median 122 km away, and one named after a region or a country 1,092 km.
Half of all the namesakes are less than 4.4 km from the place named after them, and 58% are within 10 km. But the distances are not spread evenly. They have two humps: one of neighbours, a few kilometres apart, and one of migrants, 857 links (22%) more than 1,000 km long and 587 more than 5,000 km. In between, the counts dip. A name mostly either stayed at home or crossed an ocean.
How far the names travelled
Links by distance from namesake to place, on a stretched scale (each bar covers about three times the distance of the one before), coloured by the kind of namesake. Hover a bar.
567 links (14.2%) join two different landmasses: the Americas, Africa with Europe and Asia, Australia and its neighbours, and the remote ocean islands. 74% of those are to another settlement, and their median length is 7,620 km. The longest are the British names of New Zealand: 14 of the 15 longest links end there, and the longest of all runs 19,071 km from Lansdown in the United Kingdom to Lansdowne in New Zealand, almost to the far side of the Earth.
The longest journeys
The 15 longest links, great-circle distance from namesake to place. Click a row to see it on the map.
Most namesakes lend their name only once: 92% have a single place named after them in Wikidata. The most borrowed is Prague, with 13 places, but 10 of them are in Czechia, most of them the suburbs of Czech towns called Pražské Předměstí, "Prague suburb", on the side of town that faces the capital. Amsterdam (10) is the most borrowed abroad, from New Amsterdam on Manhattan to Nieuw Amsterdam in Suriname and New Amsterdam in Guyana. Moscow's 8 are mostly city districts in Russia and Belarus called "Moskovsky", with two Dutch hamlets, Moskou and Nieuw Moscou.
The namesakes with the most places named after them
Distinct places named after each namesake, the top 15, coloured by the kind of namesake; the darker part of each bar is in another country. Click a bar to see the family on the map.
The familiar list of Old World names abroad comes next: Berlin, Paris, Bristol, Windsor, Athens and Bethlehem, each with four to six places in Wikidata, almost all of them abroad. Some of the most borrowed are not towns at all: "Europe" has 8, European quarters and districts from Brussels and Strasbourg to Luxembourg and Lille, and Anatolia has 8.
881 links (22%) cross a national border. The United Kingdom gave 259 of them, 29% of all names that went abroad, far ahead of Germany (51), the Netherlands (42) and France (41). 96% of Britain's went to four countries: 102 to the United States, 102 to Australia, 31 to Canada and 13 to New Zealand. The United States received the most (343), then Australia (138) and Canada (60).
The countries that gave and received most names
Links that cross a border: by the namesake's country (left) and by the place's country (right). Hover a bar.
Flows between regions
Each ribbon is the names that left one region (its colour) for a place in another country, in the same region or elsewhere. The width of a region's arc is the names it gave plus the names it received. Hover a ribbon.
Other flows are smaller but tell their own stories. The Netherlands gave 42 names abroad, 21 of them to the United States, the relics of New Netherland: Brooklyn after Breukelen, New Amsterdam, New Utrecht. Turkey gave Greece 12: Nea Smyrni, Nea Vyssa and other towns settled by Greek refugees from Turkey in the 1920s and named after the homes they had left. Names also went the other way, though rarely: 17 places outside the Americas are named after somewhere in the Americas, among them the Amerikamura district of Osaka and Sherbrooke, in the hills east of Melbourne, named after Sherbrooke in Quebec. And Melbourne itself lent its name to a Melbourne in Florida, 15,672 km away.
The great Spanish naming of the Americas is almost missing. Spain and Portugal gave only 34 names abroad in this file, 6 of them to Latin America and 9 to the Philippines, and Latin American places make up just 2.2% of all links. Cities such as Córdoba in Argentina or Guadalajara in Mexico are clearly named after places in Spain, but Wikidata does not yet say so. This is a gap in the data, not in history.
75 places are a "New" something named after the old one: New, Nieuw, Neu, Nova, Novo, Nueva and the rest. More than half of them (41, 55%) are within 30 km of the original: Neu-Ulm across the Danube from Ulm, New Delhi 5.9 km from old Delhi, Dutch villages called Nieuw-Something, mostly in Groningen and Drenthe, a few kilometres from the old one, and 12 new desert cities in Egypt, from New Cairo to New Aswan, built beside the cities they are named after. 18 crossed an ocean: New Amsterdam, New Madrid, New Bremen and New Glarus in the United States, Novo Hamburgo and Nova Friburgo in Brazil, Nueva Palmira in Uruguay, named after Palmyra in Syria.
Every New X, farthest first
Places whose name is a word for new plus the name of their namesake. Click a row to see it on the map.
The United States has 998 links, a quarter of the whole file. 343 are to places abroad and 316 to places outside the Americas, in 47 states. Britain supplied 102, then Germany (27) and the Netherlands (21). There are classical names (14 links, after Athens, Rome, Sparta, Ithaca, Syracuse, Antioch, Smyrna, Palmyra and Memphis) and names from the Holy Land and its neighbours (14, after Bethlehem, Hebron, Lebanon, Moab, Mount Carmel and others).
US places named after places outside the Americas, by state
The top 20 states; the darker part of each bar is townships. Hover a bar to list the places.
Minnesota leads with 45, but this is mostly a story about Wikidata. 113 of Minnesota's 151 links are townships, whose name origins someone has entered in bulk: Belgium Township, Russia Township, Malmo Township, Christiania Township (after the old name of Oslo). Other states will have as many, unrecorded.
This is not a census of borrowed names. It is a map of where Wikidata's editors have filled in "named after" for settlements, and that is very uneven. Four countries, the United States (998), Germany (433), Australia (405) and the Netherlands (323), hold 54% of all links. The United Kingdom, the source of more names abroad than anywhere, has only 73 of its own. China has 32, India 13, Brazil 40 and Mexico 1. Per person, the Netherlands has about 2,000 times as many as India. 71 of the 160 countries with a million people or more have none at all.
Links by the place's country
The 20 countries with the most links (bars) and links per million people (right). Hover a bar.
So the patterns here are real, but their sizes are not. Britain's lead as a giver of names rests on the United States and Australia, two of the best covered countries, so it is probably real. But the absence of Spanish names in Latin America, of colonial names in Africa and Asia, or of English villages named after their rivers, is an absence of data. The map will fill in as Wikidata does.
When the far-named places were founded
Places named after somewhere in another country, by the founding year Wikidata gives (its "inception"), in 25-year bins from 1500. Only 305 of the 881 have one.
Where Wikidata gives a founding date, the names that crossed a border mostly belong to the century of mass emigration from Europe: the median founding year is 1856, and 52% were founded in the 1800s.
Data. A Wikidata query, run on the QLever endpoint in 2026: every item that is a human settlement (Q486972, or any subclass) with a "named after" (P138) value that is a geographic location (Q2221906, or any subclass), both with coordinates, with English labels, countries, and the place's population and inception where Wikidata has them. The query returned 23,818 rows, because every combination of several classes, countries or coordinates repeats a row; collapsed, these are 7,666 links between 7,136 places and 6,812 namesakes. A place keeps its first coordinates, its largest population and its earliest inception.
What is a settlement. Wikidata's class of human settlements is broad. I dropped 3,684 links (48%): above all 3,295 from US census "urban areas" and other statistical areas, which Wikidata names after their main town and would count it twice; megalopolises and conurbations; regions and counties; concentration, prison and internment camps; stations, bases and ranger posts; parks and ski resorts; links from a place to itself; and administrative twins, a place with the same name as a settlement or region namesake less than 30 km away, such as a municipality named after the town it contains. Cities, towns, villages, hamlets, townships, suburbs, neighbourhoods and city districts are kept. The full list, with counts and examples, is in the data.
What the namesake is. From the namesake's Wikidata classes ("instance of"), which come without labels in the query: I read the 1,199 classes from the namesakes that carry them and listed the common ones as settlement, river, region or country, or mountain or hill; anything else is "other" (lakes, coasts, buildings, streets, parks). 78% of namesakes were sorted by a listed class; the rest by a word in the name (River, Mount, County) or counted as other. A namesake with a settlement class counts as a settlement even if it is also, say, an island.
Distance, borders and oceans. Great-circle distance between the two sets of Wikidata coordinates. For a river, a region or a mountain range Wikidata gives one point, which may be a mouth, a source or a centre, so those distances are rough. A link crosses a border when the namesake's country differs from the place's, using Wikidata's own country matched to Natural Earth (by position where Wikidata gives a historical state or none). It crosses an ocean when the two are on different landmasses: the Americas; Africa, Europe and Asia; Australia and its neighbours; Antarctica; and the remote ocean islands, with offshore islands such as Britain, Japan or New Zealand joined to the nearest mainland within 2,500 km. A "New X" is a place whose English name is a word for new followed by a name that closely matches its namesake's.
Caveats. Coverage is very uneven (section 08), and many famous borrowed names are missing: New York City, New Orleans and Sydney are not in the file, because Wikidata does not record them as named after a place with coordinates (a city named after a person, such as a duke or a governor, is outside this study). Links follow Wikidata's statements, which are mostly unsourced. English labels are Wikidata's.