Gazetteers

Gazetteers are geographical dictionaries or directories that list place names and provide accompanying information about them. They may cover all places within a region or country, or focus on specific domains such as cities, rivers, mountains, coastlines, or historical sites. Core entries typically include a standardized name, geographic coordinates, feature type (for example city, lake, hill), administrative hierarchy, variant spellings, and often additional details such as population, language forms, historical notes, and sources.

Entries in a gazetteer are designed to support accurate identification and retrieval of information about places. Typical data fields may include the name in multiple languages, alternative or former names, latitude and longitude, elevation, administrative affiliation, type of location, and references to where the data originate. Gazetteers are used as indices in cartography, navigation, geocoding, and geographic information systems (GIS), and they serve researchers by providing context for toponyms and place-age over time.

Historically, gazetteers emerged as authorities on place names to assist mapmaking, administration, and travel. They evolved from manuscript compilations in antiquity and the medieval period to standardized national and international references in the modern era. The digital age has transformed gazetteers into large, machine-readable databases and services that underpin search, routing, and spatial analysis.

There are various types of gazetteers, including national official gazetteers maintained by governments, historical gazetteers that track former names or settlements, and thematic or linguistic gazetteers focusing on specific regions, languages, or domains. Prominent contemporary examples include government-run databases such as the U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), national OS gazetteers, and open databases like GeoNames, which aggregate toponyms, coordinates, and related data from multiple sources. A gazetteer functions as a structured index of place names rather than a collection of maps.