Please note that we only display selected links. We evaluate the sites regularly and will add new sites or remove existing ones based on our best judgment.
World
The Columbia Gazetteer of the World – geographic encyclopedia. Advanced search options include searching by type of place, state or province, country, continent, population or even geographic coordinates. Post-search options include downloading search results metadata to spreadsheet or XML files.
GeoNames – geographical database that covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge.
The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online – supports limited research and cataloging efforts. Regular or extensive use of the vocabularies requires licensing.
Global Gazetteer Version 2.2 – a non-comprehensive directory; includes elevation and airport information for a limited number of places.
Jewish Gen Gazetteer – about 1,800,000 places in Europe, North Africa and The Middle East including some 6,000 Jewish communities.
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency: the NGA GEOnet Names Server is an official repository of standard spellings of all foreign place names, sanctioned by the United States Board on Geographic Names. The database also contains variant spellings (cross-references), which are useful for finding purposes; all geographic features in the database contain information about location, administrative division, and quality.
Canada
Geographical Names Board of Canada – searchable database for Canadian place names. Search geographical names by name, coordinates, unique code, or rectangular area. Provides an alphabetical list of place names.
Scotland
Gazetteer for Scotland – a vast geographical encyclopedia, featuring details of towns, villages, bens and glens from the Scottish Borders to the Northern Isles.
United States
The New England Historic and Placename Directory – contains over 100,000 placenames in New England along with maps that the feature is on. You can also search other resources for the same maps if the map is not available in their online collection.
The U.S. Board on Geographic Names – maintains uniform geographic name usage throughout the federal government; proclaims official geographic feature names with locative attributes as well as principles, policies, and procedures governing the use of domestic names, foreign names, Antarctic names, and undersea feature names.