Planet Name Maker
Pick a planet type and genre, then generate 10 planet names instantly. Free, no signup.
How planet naming works (real IAU conventions vs. fiction)
Real planet naming is almost entirely administrative. A newly discovered exoplanet doesn’t get a proper name — it gets its host star’s catalog designation plus a letter (Kepler-186f, TRAPPIST-1e), assigned in discovery order. Actual names, when they exist at all, come later through a slow, formal process run by the International Astronomical Union. Fiction has no such constraint, which is both freeing and a trap: without any naming logic at all, a story’s planets end up sounding interchangeable.
The fix most working sci-fi uses is to borrow just enough of the real convention to feel grounded — a catalog-style suffix for planets your characters treat as newly surveyed, a fuller invented name for ones with an old, settled culture — without going all the way to real IAU nomenclature, which reads as dry on the page.
Naming by planet type
Type should inform feel as much as genre does. Volcanic and desert worlds read naturally harsher — sharper consonants, shorter names. Ocean and ice worlds lean softer or more mystical, since water and cold both carry a lot of existing poetic weight in language. Gas giants tend toward grander, more expansive- sounding names, since they’re the one planet type a story’s characters usually can’t stand on — they orbit it, live near it, or mine its moons, which changes how a culture would talk about it.
Example planets
Kepleros IV
Hard Sci-Fi — Tidally locked ice world, colonized only along its permanent dusk line.
Traxis-7b
Hard Sci-Fi — Volcanic moon mined for rare isotopes; atmosphere unbreathable.
Corvexis III
Hard Sci-Fi — Ocean world under a canopy of permanent storm clouds.
Wolgaris-9c
Hard Sci-Fi — Desert planet, three suns, no native life ever confirmed.
Xanaris
Space Opera — Gas giant ringworld, home to a thousand-year trading dynasty.
Corelthys
Space Opera — Desert homeworld of an empire that hasn't lost a war in five centuries.
Zephara
Space Opera — Ocean world whose cities are built entirely on migrating kelp-forests.
Nythoria
Space Opera — A floating city-state suspended in permanent storm bands.
Ambervale
Literary Sci-Fi — Volcanic world settled by refugees who never meant to stay.
Lowreach
Literary Sci-Fi — Desert planet, its wells rationed by an unwritten but absolute code.
Saltfall
Literary Sci-Fi — Ocean world — the last generation ship's final, unplanned stop.
Pale Hollow
Literary Sci-Fi — Ice moon, quietly abandoned, quietly still receiving mail.
Glassdrift
Literary Sci-Fi — A gas giant whose atmosphere refracts light into what colonists call 'the glass hour.'
Quiethollow-4d
Hard Sci-Fi — Uninhabitable, but its telemetry keeps changing in ways no one can explain.
Vaelothis
Space Opera — Ice world sacred to a religion older than its own written language.
Farreach
Literary Sci-Fi — The planet the maps stop naming past a certain longitude.
FAQ
How do real astronomers name planets?
Exoplanets get a working designation first: the host star's catalog name plus a lowercase letter in order of discovery — the star itself is implicitly "a," so the first planet found is "b" (Kepler-186f is the fifth planet found around Kepler-186). A tiny fraction later get a real name through the IAU's public NameExoWorlds process. Solar system planets and moons follow older mythological conventions — Roman gods for the planets, moons typically named for figures associated with that god's myth.
What makes a sci-fi planet name feel real vs. fantasy?
Catalog-style structure — a plain root name plus a letter, number, or roman numeral (Traxis-7b, Kepleros IV) — reads as scientific because it mirrors how real exoplanets are actually labeled. A fully invented, flowing name with no designator (Xanaris, Vaelothis) reads as more mythic or space-opera, closer to how fantasy names a kingdom than how astronomy names a world.
Can I name a moon or star with this tool too?
Yes — nothing about the generator is planet-specific in the name itself. Use a base name (without a catalog letter) for a star, or take a generated name and treat it as the parent body, then invent a letter suffix for its moons the same way real exoplanet moons get named relative to their planet.
Back to the free tools hub. Naming a nation that lives on one of these worlds? Try the Nation Name Generator or the City Name Generator.