title_body: Designing a vocabulary for geographical features
upvoted_answer: The first thing is: Design not only one word for each geographical feature, use several of them. To give some examples from a natural language (German in this case): A mountain may have a name in -berg (which is frequent in the mittelgebirge) but also -spitze, -horn, -kopf, or -kuppe. Some beacon mountains have names of their own without an element meaning "mountain" (e.g., Brocken, Großer Belchen, Kahler Asten, or Eiger). Similarly, cities are not just -stadt "city", but there are also cities in Germany with names in -burg, -berg, -heim, -reut, -furt, or -hafen.
  
  The second thing is: Hydronyms are special. The names of larger rivers often reflect an older substrate and are not taken from the current language of the place and don't have any transparent meaning. Examples are Potomac, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri in the USA or Thames, Rhine, Rhône, and more in Europe.
  
  With this in mind, the names on the map should show some interesting variation.