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[Urist McDagger]

I don't know how hard this would be to do, or how Toady would go about it, but it'd be pretty cool to have names that actually make sense - especially if they were appropriate in context.

I just genned a world. The first stream I came to was called Budsquirmed. Not for any particular reason, and I'm not even sure it was named by any particular discovering person/group. The first hill was called the Hill of Incineration. It's a temperate biome right near the southern glacier. I'm not sure how this affects others' suspension of disbelief, but it would be pretty cool if names were thematic, instead of just randomly generated from the word lists. Then, instead of having the Hills of Rape just come up because it did, we could have the Trees of Fighting decide they should be the Hills of Smiting after a victorious battle there against the humans of the Markets of Coins.

This could also apply to humanoids (Urist Rustycog, the legendary mechanic? Really?), and possibly even titles. After all, why would the humans of the Torches of Banners come to think of the notorious local bandit chieftain/pc as "the Lazy Fluffiness of Trumpets" just because he's good at making orphans?

Anyway, I know this doesn't affect gameplay, and Toady has much more important things to worry about, but it wouldn't hurt to make the flavor stuff make sense at least most of the time.

[SuicideJunkie]

Man, you forget one measly +iron mechanism+ out in the rain, and you never live it down...

[Silverionmox]

Urist Rustycog is a great name for a legendary mechanic! It may mean he found the rusty cog in a machine room that blocked the whole apparatus... The random names do sometimes force you to find a reason why they might be relevant.

Nevertheless, I do agree that names ought to have a relevance to the people that give them. Undiscovered places shouldn't have names anyway, until they are given one (one relevant to the ones that discover them). Place names ought to change when important events happen, and the new name should be relevant to the event.

[Bohandas]

To start out though, it might be helpful to simply make the categories that symbol groups can be set for in the raws more numerous and specific.

[lordcooper]

No way man, random names are way too cool to lose.

[Neonivek]

Well topic creator how do you suggest the name generator be fixed?

[Bohandas]

Before the topic creator responds, I would just like to interject and say again that it might be helpful to increase the number and specificity of the categories in the entity raws to which symbol groups can be assigned.

[Urist McDagger]

Well topic creator how do you suggest the name generator be fixed?

I did say in my first sentence that I don't know how exactly it could be done, though Bohandas' suggestion sounds like it would help, if not "fix," the generator. An average temperate hillside three tiles away from a glacier would at least be less likely to be "the Hills of Eternal Flame, as it wouldn't even have that in its category. It'd be even better if they were simply nameless until assigned one by discovering non-kobald humanoids, but at the very least the game shouldn't gen a hot desert in the middle of the map called "the Freezing Desert." Especially not when there's a river flowing through it.

[Nivim]

 In truth, the only way to get what you're asking for without loosing the randon fun-stuff many of us like is to create an AI that has some rudimentary understanding of not only sphere relations, but of irony, inspiration, and the specific situations leading up to the naming.
 Your examples are mostly reasonable, and it would be nice if names where only generated on discovery, but for the skeleton of a generalized system Toady would put in (rather than the crippled skeleton of a specialized system), it would need to handle a lot of things that are defined similarly in the game but seem both quite different and totally obvious to us.
 For instance, if you had a freezing biome being discoved by explorers who had only seen hot biomes, "the Hills of Eternal Flame" would be an appropriate name, as the frostbite wounds incured would be most closely compared to burn wounds, except the burning doesn't stop until you "put out the flame"(warm up) or "inevitably die" (they wouldn't know about the importance of staying awake). Defining this complex situation to the game directly would either make it very specific (and thus really time consuming to do relatively well) or bias other similar things that make even less sense.
 So, until it gets dealt with a few dozen updates down the road, we can just use the above mentioned placeholder; totally random names and our imaginations.

[drilltooth]

I just assumed that it was quirks of translation, and relative alcohol tolerances that were to blame for cartographic oddities. are you really gonna wait for the elf to sober up so you can ask if you spelled misssissippippi right?

[Angel Of Death]

No way man, random names are way too cool to lose.

This. Without random names, we would have no Bengel Hairybasements, no The Watery Ocean and no Boatmurdered.

[zwei]

It could be interesting, however, to get history of names.

Learn that this hill was named by one cartain explorer. And later renamed by people in nearby village.