Names in OSM

#OpenStreetMap volunteers have mapped 115 million #placenames globally. A short article on the #OSM blog explains how the project handles local, official, and multilingual names, and that – unlike some large web map providers – its default map shows everyone the same local name.
Author

Ralph Straumann

Published

September 26, 2026

The OSM1 blog has an interesting short article on how OSM handles names in their data:

Whether you are from, Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, Springfield or Ea names are important. They help us identify where we are, where we are from and where we want to go to. Almost everything has a name and OpenStreetMap volunteers have mapped 115 million names.

The article covers how OSM handles local names, official names, and names in multiple languages. It also covers how the map on https://www.openstreetmap.org displays names:

On the default layer of the www.openstreetmap.org website (osm-carto) we don’t show different names based on where you are, this means everyone will see the name of the feature in the local language.

This is obviously different from many commercial web map providers.

Footnotes

  1. OpenStreetMap, a collaborative, open-licensed map of the world.↩︎