Random City Generator With Country and Population

Draw, narrow and keep

Five cities are on the page when it opens. Press Pick 5 new cities for five more. On a keyboard the space bar does the same. Take the others away with × until one is left when you just want to say "give me a random city" and get one name in large type. The All cities menu narrows the draw: six continents, 224 capital cities and six countries. Nothing repeats until every city in your choice has been dealt. To keep a city, take the others away with the × at the end of their rows: the next press fills the gaps and leaves what you kept.

What made the list and what did not

The list starts from the GeoNames table of world cities, downloaded on 18 September 2026. It keeps every city of 500,000 people or more, every capital, the largest cities of each country, and extra depth where people ask for it: 94 cities in China, 43 in Japan, 41 in Italy, 40 each in Russia and France and 50 in the United States. Rows that are really districts of a bigger city, such as Brooklyn and the numbered arrondissements of Paris, were taken out.

Why the population may not match your atlas

Each count is the GeoNames figure rounded to two digits, and it follows the boundary the country itself draws. Tokyo shows about 9.7 million because that covers the 23 central wards, not the whole metropolis. Chongqing shows about 22 million because its city limits take in an area close to the size of Austria, farmland included. Capital notes were checked on 18 September 2026, which is why Ciudad de la Paz, not Malabo, is marked as the capital of Equatorial Guinea.

• Quiz night: read only the city name aloud and ask the room for the country. Pick Capital cities in the menu and every answer is a capital too.
• Draw two cities and guess which lies further north before you look. Rome and Chicago sit on almost the same line of latitude.
• Writers: draw one city for where a character grew up and one for where the story opens, then work out what carried them between the two.
• For class research, press Add another until the list holds 20, press Copy the list and hand one city to each pair. Ask for its river or coast, its main language and one local dish.
• Trip game: choose Italy in the menu and plan a weekend in the first random city in Italy that comes up. There are 41, from Rome to Venice.