Random Town Generator

The Random Town Generator draws real places from a list of 44,691 towns and cities across 242 countries and territories. Choose how many you want (1 to 10), pick a country or leave it on Random, and each result comes back as a card with the town name, country, population, latitude and longitude, plus a copy button that puts the whole line on your clipboard.

Options and what comes back

• Number of towns - anything from 1 to 10 per press.
• Country - a dropdown of 242 countries and territories, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, including small ones like Aruba, Nauru and Saint Barthelemy. "Random" searches the whole list.

Every card shows the same five fields: town, country (with its ISO code), population, latitude and longitude. The copy button writes them out as one comma-separated line, so you can paste a batch of towns straight into a spreadsheet or a map tool. There are no fantasy names here; every entry is a real settlement with real coordinates.

What counts as a town in this list

The dataset is a world places list, so it runs from villages of a few hundred people up to Tokyo, Jakarta and Delhi. About three quarters of the entries (roughly 34,000) have populations under 50,000, which is where most people's idea of a "town" sits, and the median place is about 21,000 people. But a small share are big cities, so if you set the country to Japan you might get Kiyose (75,000) one time and Osaka the next. If you specifically want large cities, the Random City Generator is the better starting point; for national capitals only, use the Random Capital City Generator.

Coverage is uneven, in the way any world gazetteer is. India (about 5,900 places), the United States (5,400), Brazil (2,900), Germany (1,700) and the Philippines (1,600) have the deepest lists. Microstates and island territories may have only a handful of entries, and a few hundred very small places, mostly capitals of tiny territories, have no population figure on file, so that field shows blank.

Sample output

Ways people use it

• Geography practice. Generate ten towns from one country and find each on a map using the coordinates. The latitude and longitude are precise enough to drop a pin in any mapping app.
• Story and game settings. Writers who want a real, obscure small town rather than an invented one can pull a few and research the winner. Pairing it with the Random Country Generator first, then filtering by that country, gives a two-step "where in the world" prompt.
• Test data. Forty-four thousand real place names with coordinates is a handy source of realistic location records for seeding a database or testing an address form. The copy line pastes cleanly.
• Travel roulette. Set the country you are visiting and let the tool suggest a town you would never have searched for. The population figure tells you at a glance whether it is a village or a regional hub.
• US-only lists. Set the country to United States for American towns; if you want state-level control or state facts, the Random US State Generator and US City Generator are built for that.

For coordinates without a named place, the Random Location Generator does that, and you can browse all country, city & place generators for the rest of the set.