Map collections and resources: Gazetteers

This library guide will introduce you to Stanford Libraries map collections, services, and related resources.

Gazetteers

List of online gazetteers

Gazetteers provide exact latitude and longitude for cities, towns, and geographic places, along with population statistics where relevant. The following resources will assist you in locating these data:

Columbia Gazetteer Online
A database of names, descriptions, and characteristics of over 165,000 places in the world.
Geologic Names Lexicon (GEOLEX)
A National compilation of names and descriptions of geologic units.
GEOnet Names Server
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's database of international place names approved by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
Getty Information Institute's database of approximately 1,000,000 names representing 900,000 places.
GNIS Online Database
The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) contains almost 2,000,000 geographic features in the United States.
The JewishGen Gazetteer
A database listing Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust. Clicking on a name brings up an on-screen map from MapQuest's Interactive Atlas.
U.S. Gazetteer (U.S. Census Bureau)
This gazetteer is used to identify places to view with the Tiger Map Server and obtain census data from the 1990 Census Lookup server. You can search for places, counties, or minor civil divisions (MCDs) by entering the name and state abbreviation (optional) or 5-digit zip code.
World Historical Gazetteer (WHG)
WHG indexes place data drawn from historical sources, contributed by research projects and individuals studying the past from many disciplinary perspectives.