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[A_Curious_Cat]

I just tried embarking in DF (and ending up abandoning when Dwarven Road-Dar(tm) revealed the site to be unsuitable due to a shallow first cavern).

Anyways, while I was choosing the embark site, I remembered find out and write down the name of the local stream.

It’s name was:  “Enjoyedhorror the Frothy Tongs”.

This name was not entirely unique.  When choosing embarks, I’ve noticed that waterways often have names that are “names to run away from really fast”.  Iirc, the stream in one of my previous attempts at a fort had a name that referenced suicide.

All of this makes me wonder if something is up here…

Also, while I’m on the topic, I’m going to go on a little rant:

There are a couple of things that I don’t get about waterways in DF.  For one thing, I’ve noticed that a region tile contains a waterway that branches within the region tile, all of the branches bear the same name.  Worse yet, if a region tile contains a two or more water sources that feed streams that flow into different river systems, then for some reason all of the streams bear the exact same name.

This is truly perplexing.

P.s.  it would be nice if the name of the local waterway would appear in the [c]iv screen.  Currently, if you forget to make a note of it while choosing the embark site, you’re basically shit out of luck…

Edit:  I’ve just realized something.  In DF, iirc, creatures only get things like “the Frothy Tongs” added to their names when they achieve a certain minimum number of kills…

[Mobbstar]

Many things have unique lists in the raw/objects/language_SYM.txt (for example mountain peaks, volcanoes, biomes, buildings, locations, festivals, and wars).  But I can't find one for rivers, which makes this a very interesting question.

[PatrikLundell]

River naming: yes, I've also been unable to find any table for the naming of rivers.

DF's handing of rivers is somewhat lacking. Each world tile can only be associated with a single river (at most, of course). The data structures that specify where rivers run do not state the tiles that are the source and sinks of rivers (much of the time: it's rather messy). Instead, those are implicit and derived from the weirdo asymmetric logic that defines river flows. This means that a river that joins another river "ends" one tile away from the join, and thus all river tiles within the joining world tile end up getting the name of the only river associated with that world tile, even though they're actually the continuation of another river.