History Egopolis / RealLife

** Yekaterinburg was named for Empress Catherine I (Peter the Great's wife, not to be confused with UsefulNotes/CatherineTheGreat (II)) in 1723. It was renamed Sverdlovsk from 1924-1991, after Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov, who played a key role in ordering the execution of the Romanovs. This renaming was posthumous and definitely intended [[MonumentOfHumiliationAndDefeat to taunt the White Army]] and it was subsequently renamed back to Yekaterinburg after the Cold War.

* UsefulNotes/AlexanderTheGreat was a serial offender. There were about a dozen cities named Alexandria, with the odd Alexandropolis thrown in. Some of them were given translations of his name to the local languages, such as Kandahar in what's now Afghanistan. When he was feeling really creative, he named one city Bucephala, after his horse, Bucephalus. The generals who took over his domains often named cities after themselves, like Antiocheia (now [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antakya Antakya]]) for Antiochos and Seleukeia for Seleukos. (There are actually several Antiochs scattered about.)

** There is a reason for this: Julius Caesar had actually carried out a much-needed reform of the calendar: the Roman calendar was originally lunisolar and relied on intercalary months to stay in alignment with the seasons. However, the Romans did not use a mathematical formula to add the intercalary month; instead, a religious official, the Pontifex Maximus (High Priest), would announce the intercalary month whenever he determined the calendar and the seasons had gotten too misaligned. So far, so good; many ancient peoples with lunisolar calendars did it that way and their calendars worked just fine--the Jews did the same thing at the time and didn't have serious timekeeping problems.[[note]]The mathematical system used in today's Hebrew calendar appeared around the second or third century AD, largely because the Romans had forced the Jews out of Israel and dispersed the central priesthood that could make the announcement.[[/note]]\\

** An example featuring repeated PleaseSelectNewCityName: In 1869, a Welsh fellow named Hughes established a mining and factory town on the Seversky Donets River in modern-day Ukraine, which was named Yuzovka in his honour; this city grew and grew and eventually became a major industrial hub. After the UsefulNotes/RedOctober, it was seen as unfitting to have a foreign capitalist's name on a major city like this, so the name was changed in 1923-24 (some say it was briefly Trotsk, after Trotsky, in late 1923), first to ''Stalin'' and then to ''Stalino'' (in the late 20s or early 30s; it's not clear). Finally, in 1961 (after Stalin's death and denunciation), the city was given its current name, Donetsk, after the river.
** Another repeat example was the city of ''Yekaterinoslav'' in central Ukraine. Founded by and named for Catherine the Great, after the revolution, it was renamed to ''Dnipropetrovsk'', after high-ranking Bolshevik Grigory Petrovsky. After Ukraine’s independence, there was some trepidation around the name, especially since Petrovsky was involved in policies that contributed to the Holodomor (Ukraine’s horrific man-made famine in the 1930s). However, as Catherine the Great was also known for her anti-Ukrainian policies, simply reverting the name wasn’t an acceptable solution, and the renaming was also opposed by pro-Russian politicians (who often had nostalgia for the Soviet Union). After the Russian invasion of the 2014 led to a definitive anti-Russian and anti-Soviet backlash in Ukraine, the city was finally renamed to ''Dnipro'' in 2016, after the river that runs through the city.

* UsefulNotes/{{Liechtenstein}} is another nation named after its ruling family. Similarly to Saudi Arabia, it is composed composed of two territories with preexisting names (the Lordship of Vaduz and the County of Schellenburg).

** King Christian IV named two cities after himself: Kristiansand, and Christiania. The latter doubles as Oslo, but Christian decided to ''move the entire town'' across the bay, and then rename it after himself. It was later renamed Oslo. He also founded Kongsberg (King's mountain). This name is more of a claim, as the mountain was rich with silver, and the king wanted the indisputed right to prospect there. Thus "the mountain of the king".
** His father, Frederik II, did the same thing. The older city of Sarpsborg wasn't safe enough, so he built Fredrikstad some way downriver.

* When English Royal Astronomer William Herschel first discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, he wanted to name it Georgium Sidus (George's Star) after his patron King George III. Other astronomers eventually persuaded him to follow mythological convention for planet names, and it was named Uranus, the Romanized name of the Greek God of the Sky Ouranos.

* For his VanityProject ''Film/{{Playtime}}'', Creator/JacquesTati actually built a fully functioning city called "Tativille". It had houses, buildings, apartments and business that all had electricity, plumbing, elevators and lighting. Tati envisioned the location as a place where future filmmakers could shoot their films, ignoring his producers' more practical advice of simply buying a cheaper plot of land in an equally nice location and selling it back to developers once filming was complete. The plan was scuttled once [[AcclaimedFlop the film bombed]], Tati was forced into bankruptcy and the land was destroyed to make way for the Dumba freeway system.

* Bolivia, because of UsefulNotes/SimonBolivar, as well as the Venezuelan state Bolívar.
** And Colombia, because of UsefulNotes/ChristopherColumbus.

This created two problems: (1) Under Roman law, the Pontifex Maximus had to be physically in Rome to announce the new month, but powerful politicians generally took governorships in far-off provinces, keeping them away from Rome for years at a time. This was a significant issue, as the intercalary month needed to be added every 2-3 years (a lunar year being about 11 days shorter than a solar one). (2) Being a powerful politician, the Pontifex Maximus could--and did--mess with the announcement of the intercalary month to reward his allies with extra time in power or harm his enemies by holding off on the announcement until after their terms were over. Caesar himself held the post of Pontifex Maximus for most of his career, and provides prime examples of both problems: he spent the better part of twenty years outside Rome, first as governor of Transalpine Gaul in his (successful) campaign to conquer all Gaul for Rome (as related on his famous ''Literature/CommentariesOnTheGallicWar'', and then in his civil war against the Pompeians. While he actually was in Rome, he had been quite aggressive with his calendrical powers.[[note]]He had also used his intimate knowledge of the calendar to his military advantage during the civil war--at one point, he undertook a crossing of the Adriatic in January he (correctly) believed the Pompeian commander (his former co-consul Bibulus, who hated his guts) thought was impossible (the Adriatic is very rough in the winter), but which he knew that when you corrected for the missed intercalary months, the weather would be more like October and the crossing, while risky, was doable.[[/note]] By the time Caesar's civil war wrapped up, the calendar was completely out of whack.\\

This created two problems: (1) Under Roman law, the Pontifex Maximus had to be physically in Rome to announce the new month, but powerful politicians generally took governorships in far-off provinces, keeping them away from Rome for years at a time. This was a significant issue, as the intercalary month needed to be added every 2-3 years (a lunar year being about 11 days shorter than a solar one). (2) Being a powerful politician, the Pontifex Maximus could--and did--mess with the announcement of the intercalary month to reward his allies with extra time in power or harm his enemies by holding off on the announcement until after their terms were over. Caesar himself held the post of Pontifex Maximus for most of his career, and provides prime examples of both problems: he spent the better part of a decade outside Rome, much of it on campaign in his civil war against the Pompeians, and while in Rome, he had been quite aggressive with his calendrical powers.[[note]]He had also used his intimate knowledge of the calendar to his military advantage during the civil war--at one point, he undertook a crossing of the Adriatic in January he (correctly) believed the Pompeian commander (his former co-consul Bibulus, who hated his guts) thought was impossible (the Adriatic is very rough in the winter), but which he knew that when you corrected for the missed intercalary months, the weather would be more like October and the crossing, while risky, was doable.[[/note]] By the time Caesar's civil war wrapped up, the calendar was completely out of whack.\\

** In fact just such a fate befell the Manila International Airport—it was named ''Ninoy Aquino International Airport'' after Cory Aquino was installed in power in the 1980s. (In its defence, the man for whom it was named—Cory's husband—was shot dead at the airport itself, but today an increasing number of people are clamouring for the original name, not the least because of the deteriorating reputation that put the airport frequently in "worst airport in the world" lists, including collapsing ceilings, overcrowding, terminal fees, general decay, and, in the mid-2010s, a scandal involving ''planting bullets in passengers' bags as a form of extortion''.[[note]]The entire political family associated with the airport has also been largely discredited, rightly or wrongly, by Rightist elements convinced that the post-1986 political order did nothing or not enough to advance the country's economic progress, only making the rich richer and the poor poorer and doing nothing to combat widespread crime and corruption—this has ''some'' basis in fact, but the Aquinos were just one of many factors that kept the status quo that way. As of June 2022, with the Marcoses (the Aquinos' archenemies) fully back in power, people are now scrambling to rename the airport after dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., purely on the basis that he was president when the terminal where Ninoy was shot was built, in the early 1980s.[[/note]] Most Filipino Rightists aren't this extreme though; most of them seem fine with reverting to "Manila International Airport", the old, original, and arguably more politically-neutral name.)

** In fact just such a fate befell the Manila International Airport—it was named ''Ninoy Aquino International Airport'' after Cory Aquino was installed in power in the 1980s. (In its defence, the man for whom it was named—Cory's husband—was shot dead at the airport itself, but today an increasing number of people are clamouring for the original name, not the least because of the deteriorating reputation that put the airport frequently in "worst airport in the world" lists, including collapsing ceilings, overcrowding, terminal fees, general decay, and, in the mid-2010s, a scandal involving ''planting bullets in passengers' bags as a form of extortion''.[[note]]The entire political family associated with the airport has also been largely discredited, rightly or wrongly, by Rightist elements convinced that the post-1986 political order did nothing or not enough to advance the country's economic progress, only making the rich richer and the poor poorer and doing nothing to combat widespread crime and corruption—this has ''some'' basis in fact, but the Aquinos were just one of many factors that kept the status quo that way. As of June 2022, with the Marcoses (the Aquinos' archenemies) fully back in power, people are now scrambling to rename the airport after dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., purely on the basis that he was president when the terminal where Ninoy was shot was built, in the early 1980s.[[/note]].)

* During the Russian Imperialist and Soviet era, a lot of cities in Central Asia were built or renamed in honor of prominent ([[MightyWhitey mostly European]]) figures.
** In UsefulNotes/{{Kazakhstan}}:
*** Kyzylorda was founded as Fort-Perovsky in 1853 after its conqueror Count Vasily Perovsky. The name stuck until 1925.
*** Pavlodar was named in 1861 after Tsar Alexander II's then-newborn son, Grand Duke Paul.
*** Kostanay was called Nikolaevsk (after Tsar Nicholas II) from its founding until 1995.
*** Atyrau was known as Guryev, the name of its Russian founder, until 1991.
*** Taraz was renamed in honor of Armenian politician Levon Mirzoyan in 1936. When he fell out of UsefulNotes/JosefStalin's favor and executed during the Great Purge, it was renamed after Kazakh singer Jambyl Jabayev. It finally settled on its old name in 1997.
*** The city where the Baikonur Cosmodrome sits on was officially called [[UsefulNotes/VladimirLenin Leninsk]] from its founding to 1995. The popular name was taken from an unrelated city as a code to confuse foreigners from locating the site.
*** Aktau, formerly Shevchenko, after Ukraine's most famous poet.
*** The capital Astana was briefly renamed to Nur-Sultan following the 2019 resignation of the country's first and longest-serving president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who still retained significant political influence as head of the security council. However, in 2022, Nazarbayev fell out of favor with the current president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and, under the latter's orders, the city's name was reverted back to Astana.
** In UsefulNotes/{{Kyrgyzstan}}:
*** The capital, Bishkek, was known as Frunze from 1926 to 1991 after Romanian-Russian Bolshevik Mikhail Frunze.
*** Karakol was renamed Przhevalsk in 1888 after then recently departed Polish-Russian geographer Nikolay Przhevalsky. The city's original name was restored in 1921, only to be renamed again by Stalin to celebrate Przhevalsky's centenary. It stayed that way until the Cold War ended.
** UsefulNotes/{{Turkmenistan}}'s capital Ashgabat was known as Poltoratsk (from Bolshevik leader Pavel Poltoratskiy) from 1919 to 1927.
** In UsefulNotes/{{Tajikistan}}:
*** From 1929 to 1961, the capital Dushanbe was known as Stalinabad, taking Josef Stalin's last name with a Persian suffix for place names.
*** The second-largest city, Khujand, was called Leninabad from 1936 to 1991. The city has [[OlderThanTheyThink a longer history]] of being renamed in honor of rulers before that; it was founded as Cyropolis in the 5th century BC by Persian conqueror UsefulNotes/CyrusTheGreat. When Alexander annexed the region in the 3rd century BC, he built a settlement near Cyropolis called Alexandria Eschate. The cities later merged to form Khujand.

* Saddam International Airport in Baghdad, now called Baghdad International Airport (BIAP) or Al Anbar Airport. And Saddam City, a region/suburb of Baghdad now renamed Sadr City (after the Shia cleric Muhammad Muhammad Sadeq al-Sadr, who was assassinated in 1999 almost certainly by Saddam's orders; most of the area's population is Shia). This renaming was championed by Sadr's son, Muqtada al-Sadr. Under UsefulNotes/SaddamHussein, Iraq was arguably the most extreme example of this trope, a role later taken by Turkmenistan.
* [[UsefulNotes.DominicanRepublic Dominican]] dictator Rafael Trujillo did this a ''lot'', going as far as changing the capital city's name from Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo.
** After he died, the province of Salcedo was renamed to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermanas_Mirabal_Province Hermanas Mirabal]]. The Mirabal sisters had been [[TakeThat murdered by Trujillo's men]]; Salcedo was their home province.

* Beijing was once named Khanbaliq, "city of the Khan", by Kublai Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan. Neither of whom was really named "Khan". Even "UsefulNotes/GenghisKhan" is a title in its entirety[[note]]It roughly translates to "Oceanic ruler", which should give you a pretty good indication as to [[TakeOverTheWorld his ambitions]][[/note]]: his real name was Temujin.
* About half the geographic locations in New South Wales and Tasmania were named after NSW Governor Lachlan Macquarie, mostly by Macquarie himself.
* The city of UsefulNotes/{{Rochester}} was founded by a trio of land speculators by the names of Charles Carroll, William Fitzhugh, and Nathaniel Rochester. [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin No points for guessing which one got to name it]]. When some later accused him of vanity, Rochester defended his choice by claiming that if he'd named the city after Carroll or Fitzhugh, whichever of the two he didn't choose would have been angry with the one he did; therefore, he naturally [[TakeAThirdOption went with the name that would make both men equally angry with him]].

* British imperialist Cecil Rhodes conquered a little patch of land (modern Zimbabwe and Zambia) in Southern Africa by slaughtering everyone who opposed his right to it, and promptly named it Rhodesia.

* Detroit's main street is named Woodward Avenue, supposedly meaning "toward the woods". However, it and many other streets in Detroit were given their names by Augustus Woodward, who was Chief Justice of the Michigan Territory at the time, and was responsible for redesigning the city after a big fire burned it down in 1805. (His grandiose scheme was ultimately not implemented for lack of funds and population, but not before five of his planned major avenues were built.)[[note]]They are today Woodward, Jefferson, Grand River, Michigan, and Gratiot Avenues; Jefferson runs parallel to the Detroit River; Woodward is perpendicular to Jefferson and goes to Pontiac; Grand River and Michigan split the area between Woodward and West Jefferson into thirds, with Grand River running along an old Indian trail that leads to Lansing (the state capital), Grand Rapids (the second-largest city), and Muskegon, while Michigan Avenue ultimately takes you to UsefulNotes/{{Chicago}}; Gratiot Avenue bisects the area between Woodward and East Jefferson and goes to Mount Clemens (the seat of Macomb County, i.e. the city's northeastern suburbs) and Port Huron (where Lake Huron narrows into the St. Clair River and a major border crossing with Canada).[[/note]]

* Williamstown, Massachusetts and the college it contains, Williams College, are named after the same man, Ephraim Williams, who left his estates to Massachusetts in his will on the condition that they use them to build a school, and that the school and the town its in both be named after him. On top of this, the college's sports teams call themselves the Williams Ephs.
* Herod the Great had a pleasure palace/small city created for himself and called it Herodium.

* UsefulNotes/{{Melbourne}}, Australia was founded by a man called John Batman. For a while it was called Batmania, until it was officially renamed Melbourne (after Lord Melbourne, the British Prime Minister of the day) in 1836.
* Contrary to what people may think, Ho Chi Minh City is actually a subversion. The city was South Vietnam's capital, then named Saigon. However, once the North conquered the South in 1975, they renamed the city after their leader... who had died in 1969. The rename was less an egocentric move and more akin to [[MonumentOfHumiliationAndDefeat taunting the South Vietnamese and America]].
* Not necessarily a city example, but politicians in the Philippines are disproportionately fond of affixing their names (or failing that, their initials) to public works projects. It is very common to see street flyers or posters announcing things like "Road Renovation c/o Mayor X" or "This bridge is a project of Congressman Y"—often including the grinning faces of the politicians in question, and at least in some cases painting said projects with their own theme colours and logos based on said initials, e.g. "Let's Join Forces" for Cavite politician [[https://www.facebook.com/jonjonferrerofficial Luis Ferrer]], the LJF backronym standing for '''L'''uis "'''J'''on-Jon" '''F'''errer. It gets bad enough that at one point in the early 2010s, several members of Congress attempted to file a bill to rename EDSA, Manila's main highway, after the late president Cory Aquino, the central figure of popular anti-dictatorship protests that occurred on the said highway.
** In fact just such a fate befell the Manila International Airport—it was named ''Ninoy Aquino International Airport'' after Cory Aquino was installed in power in the 1980s. (In its defence, the man for whom it was named—Cory's husband—was shot dead at the airport itself, but today an increasing number of people are clamouring for the original name, not the least because of the deteriorating reputation that put the airport frequently in "worst airport in the world" lists, including collapsing ceilings, overcrowding, terminal fees, general decay, and, in the mid-2010s, a scandal involving ''planting bullets in passengers' bags as a form of extortion''.[[note]]The entire political family associated with the airport has also been largely discredited, rightly or wrongly, by Rightist elements convinced that the post-1986 political order did nothing or not enough to advance the country's economic progress, only making the rich richer and the poor poorer and doing nothing to combat widespread crime and corruption—this has ''some'' basis in fact, but the Aquinos were just one of many factors that kept the status quo that way. As of June 2022, with the Marcoses (the Aquinos' archenemies) fully back in power, people are now scrambling to rename the airport after dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., purely on the basis that he was president when the terminal where Ninoy was shot was built, in the early 1980s.[[/note]].)
** Quezon City was planned to be the new capital for the Philippines after nearby Manila is deemed too vulnerable to naval attacks. President Manuel Quezon envisioned the new city to be populated by workers from the Manila suburbs; hence one of the Quezon City neighboorhoods was called ''Barrio Obrero'' or the Worker's Neighborhood. Originally, it was envisioned to be named Balintawak City, after the town where the Philippine Revolution is generally understood to have started, but Narciso Ramos and Eugenio Perez, both legislators, suggested that the new city be named after Quezon instead and the President agreed. It served as the capital of the Philippine during the regaining of independence in 1946 until 1975, when it returned to Manila.
** ''The entire Philippines itself'' was named after the Spanish King Philip II—making it almost the only country in the world named for a foreign ruler. For the curious, attempts to change the name post-independence largely went nowhere due to struggles with finding a name everybody could agree on. When they finally found an acceptable name, "Malaysia", [[UsefulNotes/{{Malaysia}} another country]] snatched it up first and the debate fizzled out.
* UsefulNotes/{{Seoul}} was almost going to be renamed to 'Unam' after a prominent scholar pointed out that since the name literally means 'capital city', it needs to be changed. The name in question, 'Unam', was an [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_name art name]] or pseudonym of the first president of UsefulNotes/{{South Korea}}, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee Syngman Rhee]] who was a liberator turned dictator. His cronies thought it was a great idea, but the scholar who proposed a name change and the opposition in the assembly fought hard to oppose the name change, until the dictator himself thought that it was a bit too much.

* The Czech entrepreneur Tomáš Baťa founded several towns around the world, naming them after himself (Batawa in Ontario, Batadorp in the Netherlands, Batapur in Pakistan, Batanagar and Bataganj in India...) and centering them on his shoe factories. His half-brother Jan Antonín also founded Batatuba, Batayporã and Bataguassu in Brazil.
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlandia Fordlândia]], a prefabricated industrial town constructed in the Brazilian state of Pará. It was naturally founded by the founder and then president of the Ford motor company, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford Henry Ford]]. It was meant to be a industrial town where workers would grow and "harvest" rubber tree plants to make tires for Ford automobiles. Revolts, diseased trees, and ultimately the creation of a cheap synthetic rubber led to the abandonment of the failed project.
* Delhi is believed to be named after Dhillu, the king who had the city built in 50 BC.
* During his dictatorship, François Duvalier (Papa Doc) renamed the town of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabaret,_Ouest Cabaret]], Haiti, to Duvalierville and started a megalomaniacal construction project. It was never finished.
* Tigran the Great of Armenia named about four cities "Tigranakert" during his reign. The ruins of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigranakert_of_Artsakh Tigranakert of Artsakh]] are located in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
* Bolivia, because of UsefulNotes/SimonBolivar, as well as the Venezuelan state Bolívar.
** And Colombia, because of UsefulNotes/ChristopherColumbus.
* Subverted with Hoovervilles, shantytowns set up in the early stages of TheGreatDepression which gained their moniker because the residents felt President UsefulNotes/HerbertHoover was responsible for their misery.
** A modern take in UsefulNotes/{{Seattle}} is "Nickelsville", a semi-permanent homeless encampment (it changes places around the city every few months), named for Greg Nickels, a mayor who was known for his friendliness towards real estate developers that triggered steep increases in the city's average rent, as well as his ham-fisted handling of the WTO protests (part of the protests were about organizations like WTO making policies that benefited the corporate-owning class while making cities like Seattle too expensive for working-class people to live in).

* Saudi Arabia is this applied to a ''whole country'' -- it is named after its ruling dynasty. It would be like Britain being called Windsorland. Also, within Saudi Arabia, we have:
** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_Economic_City King Abdullah Economic City]] and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Khalid_Military_City King Khalid Military City]].
*** ItMakesSenseInContext. Saudi Arabia as such didn't exist until the Saud family conquered its territories. Before it was whatever Ibn Thistribe, Ibn Thattribe, and [[RuleOfThrees Ibn Theothertribe]] could [[AsskickingLeadsToLeadership hold]] amidst a desert so barren that ruling over territory was more like ruling the ocean than ruling cultivated land. Arabian princes of old counted their power in their herds and numbers of clients rather then their territory. So it's no surprise that "Saudi Arabia" just means [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin "parts of Arabia ruled by the House of Saud"]]. On the other hand, the territories did have names; most of the country is composed of the old territories of Hijaz (on the western coast, between the mountains and the Red Sea) and Najd (the central plateau), which contained virtually everything worth mentioning (what is today the eastern coast was very sparsely inhabited, with a few villages scattered here and there down the coast and nothing much between the sea and the plateau). "Hijaz and Najd" or "Najd and Hijaz" would be a perfectly acceptable name for the country, and indeed that's what UsefulNotes/AbdulAzizIbnSaud called it [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Nejd_and_Hejaz for the first six years after conquering Hijaz]]. He changed the name in 1932 to emphasize that he was running the country as one unit, rather than as two units in personal union.

* Vallejo, California, named for General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. The next city south is named Benicia after his wife, though the pronunciation (originally /be NI si a/) is usually anglicized (to /ben I sha/).
* Mexico is full of these:
** Four Mexican states are named for heroes of the Mexican War of Independence: Guerrero, Hidalgo, Morelos, and Quintana Roo. These were all named well after the deaths of the heroes, but the first three were named while the men were still in living memory, or nearly so. Guerrero in particular was carved out in 1849 from the territory of four different states because they had been Vicente Guerrero's personal fiefdom, just eighteen years after his untimely death.
** In many parts of Mexico, you'll find many small towns renamed after a president. Examples: [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lázaro_Cárdenas,_Michoacán Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán]], named for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lázaro_Cárdenas a president of the 1930s who was from the state]]) (formerly [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melchor_Ocampo Melchor Ocampo]], and before that it was called "Los Llanitos"[[note]]the small plains[[/note]] or Hueytlaco[[note]]from a Nahuatl word meaning "big place"[[/note]]), ; and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_Díaz_Ordaz Gustavo Díaz Ordaz]] (formerly San Miguel de Camargo), [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_Díaz_Ordaz,_Tamaulipas Tamaulipas]]. There were also streets, boulevards and even statues made to honor the presidents, which (while not made by the men themselves, but rather the guys who succeeded them) were made during their lifetimes. That being said, probably the most common presidential street name in Mexico--roughly equivalent to "[[UsefulNotes/GeorgeWashington Washington Street/Boulevard/Avenue]]" in Gringolandía--is "Calle/Bulevar/Via/Avenida Francisco I. Madero", pretty much all of which were named well after the end of the [[UsefulNotes/TheMexicanRevolution revolution]] the namesake president had started and been martyred for.
* Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa and one of the largest in the world, was named for UsefulNotes/QueenVictoria by British explorer John Hanning Speke in 1858, during her reign.
** There are other places around the former British Empire that were founded and named after her during her reign, such as Victoria, the capital of British Columbia (1843); and Victoria state in Australia (original colony formed in 1851); and the City of Victoria, the chief city of Hong Kong Island, named in 1843.
* The former British colony and present US state of Maryland is officially claimed to have been named after Queen Consort Mary (Henrietta Maria), wife of Charles I of England, in 1632 (during her reign), although [[Website/{{Wikipedia}} The Other Wiki]] cites some historical claims that founder George Calvert actually named the colony after Mary the mother of Jesus.
* Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, was named after King UsefulNotes/JamesI in 1607 (during his reign). And Williamsburg, the famously preserved colonial village that was a one-time capital of Virginia Colony, used to be called Middle Plantation before it was renamed Williamsburg in 1699 after then-reigning King William III.
* The US state and former colony UsefulNotes/{{Georgia|USA}} was named after King George II during his reign in 1732.
* Louisiana Territory, which once covered most of the vast Mississippi-Missouri watershed of North America and was also known as New France, was named for Louis XIV during his reign.
* UsefulNotes/{{North|Carolina}} and UsefulNotes/SouthCarolina (and the city of Charleston, SC) were named after King Charles (both I and II--the first granted the original charter to a certain Lord Heath, the second re-granted it, after the monarchy was restored, to 8 of his loyal nobles as the original charter was deemed to have expired.) Charles in Latin is "Carolus," which accounts for the "Carolina," meaning Carolus' land.
* The city of Charlotte, NC, was named after Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III. The surrounding county, Mecklenburg, was named after the region of Germany where she originally came from.
* When King Charles II gave William Penn a sizeable land grant in North America, he named it UsefulNotes/{{Pennsylvania}} (meaning "Penn's Woods"); William Penn was actually embarrassed that the king named it after him, at which point the King explained that no, he wasn't naming it for Penn himself--whose Quakerism he disdained and whom he personally disliked--but rather for Penn's ''father'', who had been a respected admiral in the [[UsefulNotes/BritsWithBattleships Royal Navy]] who had helped [[UsefulNotes/EnglishCivilWar Charles take back his throne]], and had been an Anglican to boot (and to top it off, the land grant was in satisfaction of a debt the King owed to the elder Penn). Penn would have preferred either New Wales (because a lot of the settlers who planned to go were Welsh[[note]]to this day, several towns west of Philadelphia have Welsh names, and the area is called the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Tract Welsh Tract]][[/note]]) or Sylvania (again, because of the woods), but Charles II would not change the name of the grant.
* New York's (the [[UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity city]] and the [[UsefulNotes/NewYorkState state]]) namesake is James Stuart, the Duke of York, and later, King James II. He was the Lord High Admiral when the [[UsefulNotes/BritsWithBattleships Royal Navy]] captured New Amsterdam from the Dutch.
* When UsefulNotes/{{Michigan}} Territory was trying to become a state in the late 1820s and early 1830s, its legislature, seeking to curry favor with the present Administration, carved out ten counties named after UsefulNotes/AndrewJackson and his Cabinet in south-central and southwestern Michigan: Jackson County (after the President), Calhoun County (after the Vice President, John C. Calhoun), Van Buren County (after then-Secretary of State, later Vice President, and then President UsefulNotes/MartinVanBuren), Livingston County (after Secretary of State Edward Livingston, who took the job after Van Buren became Veep), Ingham County (after Treasury Secretary Samuel Ingham), Eaton County (after Secretary of War John Eaton), Cass County (after Eaton's successor as Secretary of War Lewis Cass, although at the time the county was named he was Territorial Governor of Michigan), Branch County (after Navy Secretary John Branch), Berrien County (after Attorney General John Berrien), and Barry County (after the Postmaster General, William Barry). This plan didn't ''quite'' work--the President did not end up intervening in Michigan's favor in its border dispute with Ohio over UsefulNotes/{{Toledo|Ohio}}--but to this day, these ten counties are called "Cabinet counties", and Jackson did end up signing the bill to make Michigan the 26th state as one of his last acts in office (in 1837).

* Trope prevalent in the naming of the cities in the [[UsefulNotes/DemocraticRepublicOfTheCongo Belgian Congo]]:
** ''Léopoldville'' from [[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léopold_II_de_Belgique Leopold II]]
** ''Stanleyville'' from Henry Morton Stanley
** ''Coquilhatville'' from [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille-Aimé_Coquilhat Camille Coquilhat]]
** ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubumbashi Elisabethville]]'' from [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_of_Bavaria_(1876–1965) the Queen Elisabeth]]
** ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudouinville Baudouinville]]'' from [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudouin_of_Belgium the King Baudoin]]
** ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costermansville Costermansville]]'' from Paul Costermans

* Plenty of places around the world are named for someone now forgotten; we don't know anything about Occa, for example, except that he lived by a ford (Oxford).
** In fact, a fair bit of English toponymy – not so much in Wales, Ireland north or south, or Scotland – is this. There are plenty of "place of So-and-So's People" names: both Gillinghams, Wokingham, Hastings, and the like, for Gylla and Gilla and Wocca and Haesta and their followers. There are a fair few place-names which incorporate an element of ''official,'' of ''ex officio,'' ownership or overlordship: Compton Abbas (the Abbot's or local Abbey's Compton), the obvious Bishop's Stortford, Earls Barton (owned by the Earl of Northampton and then by successive Earls of Huntingdon), Princes Risborough (held by the Black Prince), Tettenhall Regis (held by the Crown directly), Collingbourne Ducis (owned by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster), and so on. And then there are those named directly for their lords: Compton '''Beauchamp,''' Huish '''Champflower''' (the Bishop's Huish was and is Huish Episcopi), Ewyas '''Lacy,''' Ewyas '''Harold''' (and, indirectly, Teffont ''Evias,'' two counties away, which shared a lord with the latter but took its suffix from the other estate's place-name and not the lord), Sutton '''Waldron,''' Sutton '''Valence,''' Sutton '''Courtenay,''' ''Wooton'' '''Courtenay'''.... Apparently, after ten or so centuries, the actual egotism ceases to operate in accordance with the trope.
* In Argentina, the provinces of El Chaco and La Pampa were for a time renamed Presidente Juan Perón and Eva Perón.

* Metapa, in Nicaragua, was renamed to Ciudad Darío (Darío City), in honor of the great poet Rubén Darío, who was born there.
* Jonestown, the {{Cult}} community founded in Guyana, was named after its leader UsefulNotes/JimJones [[note]]It also doubled as a pun on the name of Guyana's capital, Georgetown[[/note]]. It did not end well.
* When the Dutch established a colony in northern Brazil, its capital was named [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritsstad Mauritsstad]] (now Recife), after its founder and governor Prince John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen.
* Townsville, a city in the Australian state of Queensland (and not the setting of ''WesternAnimation/ThePowerpuffGirls'', just so we're clear), was founded by and named after [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Towns Robert Towns]].
* The Dutch New Guinean capital city of Hollandia was renamed Sukarnopura in 1964, shortly after the region received independence from Dutch rule and was given to UsefulNotes/{{Indonesia}}, whose then-President Sukarno had actively campaigned for the colony's integration to his country. While he probably meant well (as a way to legitimize native rule over the region), it's also a sign of just how far his authoritarianism had gotten, ever since he abolished the parliamentary democracy and instituted a one-man rule as part of the "[[PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny Guided Democracy]]". After he met his downfall in a coup attempt in 1965, his successor Suharto renamed the city to Jayapura ("city of glory"), where it remains to this day.