Random Location Generator

The Random Location Generator picks one to ten real towns and cities from a list of 2,000 places spread across 138 countries. Each result is a card with the place name, its two-letter country code, and its latitude and longitude in decimal degrees, with a copy button that grabs all four values as one line. It's built for people who need an actual point on the map rather than a made-up name: writers placing a scene, teachers setting a geography exercise, developers who need location test data, and anyone playing a "guess where this is" game.

What you can set

There's one control: how many locations to draw, from 1 to 10. Every click reshuffles the full list, so a batch of ten won't contain duplicates, though the same place can show up again on a later click. There's no country or continent filter. If you want to stay inside one country, the Random City Generator and US City Generator are the better fit, and the Random Country Generator works if you only need the country.

What a result looks like

Each card shows four fields, and the copy button writes them out as Place,CC,Latitude:xx.xxxxx,Longitude:yy.yyyyy so you can paste straight into a spreadsheet or a map search box. A few real entries from the list:

Paste the latitude and longitude, comma-separated, into Google Maps or OpenStreetMap and it drops a pin on the place. Negative latitude means the southern hemisphere; negative longitude means west of Greenwich.

What's in the list

The 2,000 entries are populated places, mostly small and mid-sized towns rather than capitals, which is what makes the tool useful for "random place in the world" games: you'll rarely land somewhere you already know. The spread is uneven and follows where the source data is densest. The United States has the most entries at 265, followed by Italy (138), France (126), Mexico (117), Germany (112), Spain (96), the Philippines (81), the United Kingdom (66), Romania (64), China (59), Russia (57) and Australia (51). The remaining 126 countries have fewer entries each, some only one or two. Coordinates are given to five decimal places, which is roughly one-meter precision, and point at the town center rather than a specific street. If you need a deliverable street address rather than a map point, that's a different kind of tool and lives under the address generators.

Country is shown as an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code (PL, IT, IN, US) rather than the full name. Most are obvious; the ones that trip people up are DE for Germany, CH for Switzerland, ES for Spain and GB for the United Kingdom.

Ways people use it

• Geography guessing games. Generate one location, read out the coordinates, and have players guess the country before revealing the code. Works well in a classroom or on a video call.
• Fiction and worldbuilding. Draw a place you've never heard of, look it up, and use its real terrain and climate as the setting for a scene. Pairing it with the Random Town Generator gives you a fictional name to go with a real landscape.
• Test data. Ten clicks gives you a hundred real coordinate pairs with matching country codes, which is handy for testing a map widget, a geocoding call or a distance calculation.
• Travel research and virtual trips. Drop the coordinates into Street View and spend ten minutes somewhere random. The list skews toward small towns, so it's a good antidote to the same twenty tourist cities.
• Deciding where to point a project. Photographers, drone hobbyists and amateur radio operators use random spots as prompts for where to explore or which region to study next.

For random picks at other scales, the Random Capital City Generator stays on capitals and the Random US State Generator stays inside the US. The full set of place tools is under all country, city and place generators.