Many German place names began as plain descriptions of the spot. A river crossing, say, or a clearing in the woods.
Frankfurt and Erfurt both grew up at a ford. Düsseldorf is named after the Düssel, a small river, and not after the Rhine flowing past its old town. The name first shows up in 1135 as Dusseldorp, the village on the Düssel.
Once you can read the endings, a road map starts telling stories.
Let me give you the full index of cities, towns, and villages first.
Every German City, Town, Village — A to Z
Looking for a particular place? Start with its first letter.
How to Read a German Place Name
Most names are built from two parts. The first part often names a founder or a river. The ending says what kind of place stood there.
Take a train through Swabia and you’ll pass one -ingen after another, such as Tübingen, Reutlingen, and Böblingen. The ending goes back to the early Middle Ages and means something like “at the people of.” Herbertingen was home to Herbert’s people. Nobody remembers Herbert anymore, but the town kept his name. :-)
In Bavaria, the same ending often shrank to -ing, as in Freising.
Some explanations are too tidy to be true. Osnabrück certainly means a bridge, and the popular story says oxen crossed it. Name researchers point to an old name of the river Hase instead.
In the east, many names come from Slavic languages. Endings like -itz and -ow give them away, as in Delitzsch and Malchow. Leipzig is usually explained as the place of the linden trees. Its oldest spelling, Libzi from 1015, makes name researchers doubt even that.
| Ending | What It Meant | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| -furt | a ford | Frankfurt, Erfurt |
| -brück, -brücken | a bridge | Osnabrück, Zweibrücken |
| -hafen, -haven | a harbor | Bremerhaven, Wilhelmshaven, Ludwigshafen |
| -burg | a castle or fortified place | Hamburg, Magdeburg |
| -berg | a hill or mountain | Heidelberg |
| -dorf | a village | Düsseldorf |
| -heim | a home or homestead | Mannheim, Hildesheim |
| -ingen, -ing | at the people of a founder | Tübingen, Herbertingen, Freising |
| -rode, -reuth | a clearing in the forest | Wernigerode, Walsrode, Bayreuth |
| -münster | a monastery | Münster |
| -itz, -ow | a name of Slavic origin | Delitzsch, Rochlitz, Malchow, Lüchow |
What the Town Sign Adds
The word Bad (spa) in front of a name isn’t decoration. It’s a protected title, and only towns with official status as a healing spa may carry it, such as Bad Ems or Bad Nauheim.
The states can also grant a town an extra title that reflects its history. Wittenberg’s official name is Lutherstadt Wittenberg (Luther Town Wittenberg).
Many names exist more than once, so the name often carries a river or a region along with it. Frankfurt am Main is the big one on the Main, while Frankfurt (Oder) sits on the Polish border. Halle (Saale) is a city on the Saale, and Halle (Westphalia) is a small town far to the west.
It adds up quickly. The N page of the index alone lists seventeen towns called Neustadt and twelve called Neuenkirchen.
Cities Built to a Plan
Some cities were laid out on paper first. In the center of Mannheim, the blocks carry letters and numbers instead of street names, so an address reads like D 6, 2. There are 144 of these Quadrate (squares), and hardly any of them is actually square. ;-)
Karlsruhe went for a fan instead. When the margrave laid the foundation stone of his palace in 1715, thirty-two avenues were cut outward from its tower. The town grew between the nine that point south. Its name means Karl’s rest.
Along the Baltic, the old Hanseatic towns show their wealth in brick. Lübeck, Stralsund, and Wismar are on the World Heritage List for it. In Dresden, the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) was rebuilt between 1994 and 2005 and stands in the old town again.
From Million Cities to Villages
Four of our cities have more than a million people: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Cologne. Cologne was the last to cross that line, in 2010.
Around eighty cities have more than a hundred thousand residents. Below them come hundreds of mid-sized towns.
Then there’s the long tail. Germany counts more than ten thousand municipalities, and more than half of them have fewer than two thousand people.
Which of these places deserve a night on your trip is a question for places to visit in Germany. The landscapes around them are on German regions, and the states they belong to on German states.