Getting Started
Gazetteers & Place Name Guides
Gazetteer of British Placenames
Provides the most exhaustive placename index to Great Britain, including
commonly accepted alternative spellings and Welsh and Gaelic versions
Geographic Names Information System (GNIS)
Covers the United States and its territories
Geographical Names of Canada
Produced by the Geographic Names Board of Canada (GNBC)
Geographic Names Server (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency)
Per its homepage, "provides access to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's (NGA) and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names' (US BGN) database of foreign geographic feature names. The database is the official repository of foreign place-name decisions approved by the US BGN. Approximately 20,000 of the database's features are updated monthly"
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online
One of the Getty vocabulary databases produced and maintained by the Getty Vocabulary Program, the TGN is a structured vocabulary containing around 912,000 records, including 1.1 million names, place types, coordinates, and descriptive notes, focusing on places important for the study of art and architecture
Minnesota Place Names
Produced by the Minnesota Historical Society, this site "provides quick access to the stories behind the names, thousands of miniature histories that capture the lost lore of familiar places"
U.S. Board on Geographic Names
Per its homepage, "the U.S. Board on Geographic Names is a Federal body created in 1890 and established in its present form by Public Law in 1947 to maintain uniform geographic name usage throughout the Federal Government"
U.S. Gazetteer Files (U.S. Census Bureau)
Per its homepage, "The U.S. Gazetteer Files provide a listing of all geographic areas for selected geographic area types. The files include geographic identifier codes, names, area measurements, and representative latitude and longitude coordinates."