Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad and then Volgograd. Leningrad became Saint Petersburg again. I read every dated official name of a place in Wikidata and found 6,842 true renamings, in waves: revolution, its undoing, war, independence and nation-building. The busiest year of all belongs to Romanian villages in 1964.

Renaming a town costs a new regime almost nothing and says a great deal. Streets, villages and whole cities have been renamed to honour revolutionaries, to forget them again, to mark independence, to replace a language, or simply to tidy up after merging two villages into one. I wanted to see those waves across the whole world at once, so I turned to Wikidata, which records the official name of many places along with the date each name began and ended.

Most name changes are not new names

The first surprise was how little of the record is renaming. Wikidata holds 17,025 dated changes of official name on towns, villages and administrative areas. Nearly half keep the name: 1,237 are new spellings or transliterations, 3,185 are a village becoming a town or a town becoming a city (very often in Japan), and 3,730 add or drop a qualifier, the way a French commune turns into something-sur-Mer. A batch of 1,859 Galician place names all dated 2026 turned out to be a revision of the regional gazetteer, and 170 changes were recorded twice, once on a village and again on its commune, say. Once all that is set aside, 6,842 true renamings of 5,769 places remain.

The waves

I sorted each renaming into a wave using rules written down in advance: the country, the date, and the words in the old and new names. The biggest wave by far is revolution and communism, 2,852 renamings, from Stalingrad and Karl-Marx-Stadt to the many villages renamed under communist rule. Next comes nation-building and language policy (890), mostly in the former Soviet republics after 1991. Then mergers and administrative reform (548), the undoing of revolutionary and communist names (529), war and new borders (107) and decolonisation (22). That last number tells you about Wikidata, not about history: most of the famous renamings that followed independence in Africa and Asia have no dated official name there, so this study cannot measure that wave. 1,894 fit none of the rules: local decisions to honour someone, to sound better, or to tell two places apart.

The busiest decade is the 1960s, and nearly half of that is one country in one year. In 1964, 596 Romanian villages were given new names, some replacing names that sounded unflattering: Puturoasa, from the Romanian for stench, became Teiușu. The war years come next, with Soviet renamings and the German names of the lands that became Polish and Russian in 1945. Since 2015 Ukraine has dominated: 261 places in the data lost communist names in 2016 under the decommunisation laws, and 219 more in 2024 under a 2023 law against names tied to Russia, 91 of them Soviet names that had survived the first round.

Vladikavkaz was Ordzhonikidze, then Dzaudzhikau, then Ordzhonikidze again, and then Vladikavkaz.

Renamed, and renamed back

860 places were renamed more than once. Luhansk was Voroshilovgrad twice. Rybinsk was named after one Soviet official in 1946 and after Andropov in 1984, and got its own name back both times. The capital of Kazakhstan was renamed 6 times, as often as any place in the data: from Ak-Mola to Akmolinsk in 1832, then Tselinograd, Akmola, Astana, Nur-Sultan and Astana again. Altogether 303 places went back to a name they had held before.

A record that leans east

The map says as much about Wikidata as about the world. 47% of the renamings are in the former Soviet Union, and Ukraine, Romania, Russia, France and Japan together hold 65%. Africa, where independence brought some of the best-known renamings of all (Léopoldville to Kinshasa, Salisbury to Harare), has only 35. I checked twenty famous renamings away from colonial names in Africa and Asia: 7, including Calcutta to Kolkata and Bathurst to Banjul, are not in the data at all, and Bombay to Mumbai and Madras to Chennai came too long after independence for my rule, so they count as nation-building. Only 7 of the twenty land in the decolonisation wave. The UK has 23, nearly all parishes and urban districts taking a joined name, like Lynton becoming Lynton and Lynmouth. Ireland has none: the return of Kingstown to Dún Laoghaire and of Queenstown to Cobh are simply not recorded with dates. Derry and Londonderry, two names used side by side, is not a renaming at all.

How I did this

I took every Wikidata item with coordinates and an official name carrying a start or end date: 32,309 items and 79,554 names. Within each language, a renaming is a name whose end date falls within a year of another name’s start date. A name that ends with nothing after it, usually because a village was merged into a neighbour, is not a renaming. I then tested each change for spelling, status and qualifiers, and sorted the rest into waves by rules applied in a fixed order. I read every renaming in the smaller waves, every place renamed three times or more and samples of everything else, and rewrote the rules wherever they went wrong. In all 11.9% of the name changes were removed as errors, duplicates or the Galician batch. The waves are my rules, not a historian’s verdict on each case, and the counts describe the record, not the world.

Notes and sources

• Official names and dates: Wikidata (CC0), property P1448 with start and end dates, queried through QLever.
• Present-day countries: Natural Earth (public domain). Base map of the interactive version: The Inked World, from OpenStreetMap data via OpenFreeMap (ODbL).
• Further reading: Rose-Redwood, Alderman and Azaryahu (2010) Geographies of toponymic inscription, Progress in Human Geography 34(4).
• Paper: Hotham, T. (2026) The renamed world. Zenodo. 10.5281/zenodo.24075301
• I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.