geonames

The GeoNames gazetteer, one night's dump at a time: 13.5 million named places around the world, their 19 million alternate names in hundreds of languages, the administrative hierarchy, and the small code tables, as GeoNames published them, with Parquet beside them.

CC BY 4.0. Credit GeoNames (https://www.geonames.org/).

Why dated snapshots

GeoNames rebuilds its dump every night at the same URLs, with no version number or checksum, and keeps past versions only for paying subscribers. A result computed on one day cannot be checked against the next. Each subset here is named after the night it holds, {snapshot}.{table} as wikimedia/wikipedia names its dumps, and a new night is added beside the others; nothing already here changes.

snapshot	allCountries.zip Last-Modified
20261001	Thu, 01 Oct 2026 02:08:51 GMT

What is in a snapshot

table	rows (20261001)
geoname	13,472,217	the gazetteer, with a point geometry (GeoParquet)
alternate_names	19,219,062	names in other languages and forms, codes, links
hierarchy	519,183	parent and child, mostly administrative
admin_code5	78,514	the fifth administrative level, kept apart by GeoNames

raw/{snapshot}/ holds the files as GeoNames served them: allCountries.zip, alternateNamesV2.zip, hierarchy.zip, adminCode5.zip, admin1CodesASCII.txt, admin2Codes.txt, countryInfo.txt, featureCodes_en.txt, iso-languagecodes.txt, timeZones.txt and readme.txt, with MANIFEST.json giving the URL, size, sha256 and Last-Modified of each. The per-country zips and the cities files are subsets of allCountries and are not kept.

geoname is four files cut between countries (part-00 from the rows with no country to FO, part-01 FR to NL, part-02 NO to UM, part-03 US to ZW), sorted by country_code and geonameid, so a query on one country reads few row groups. parquet/{snapshot}/outputs.json lists the files with their rows, sizes, sha256 and countries.

Columns

The columns are those of GeoNames' readme.txt in snake case. geonameid, population, elevation and dem are integers; latitude and longitude floats; modification_date a date; everything else the text of the file, so admin1_code 01 keeps its zero. The four is_* flags of the alternate names, '1' or empty in the source, are booleans. A value that did not fit would have stopped the build; none did. 623 names contain a double quote, which is why the files are read with quoting off.

Things to know

admin1_code is mostly FIPS, not ISO. Japan's prefectures run 01 Aichi to 47 Okinawa in Latin alphabetical order, not in the JIS order that starts with Hokkaido.

country_code is empty for 7,112 rows: oceans, continents and other places in no country. The rows with the largest population are Earth, Asia and the Pacific Rim.

Japanese names are in alternate_names, not in geoname.name, which is almost always Latin script. For Japan, 174,920 alternate names have isolanguage = 'ja', in kanji and kana mixed with nothing to tell them apart.

isolanguage = 'wkdt' rows hold Wikidata ids (1,111,651 of them), the key for joining GeoNames to Wikidata; link rows hold URLs, mostly Wikipedia.

-- DuckDB, straight off the Hub: Kyoto city and its Japanese names
SELECT g.geonameid, g.name, a.alternate_name, a.is_preferred_name
FROM 'hf://datasets/yuiseki/geonames/parquet/20261001/geoname/part-01.parquet' g
JOIN 'hf://datasets/yuiseki/geonames/parquet/20261001/alternate_names.parquet' a USING (geonameid)
WHERE g.geonameid = 1857910 AND a.isolanguage = 'ja';

Reproducing it

git clone https://github.com/yuiseki/geonames
cd geonames
uv run python scripts/01_download.py        # tonight's dump, as a new snapshot
uv run python scripts/03_export_parquet.py
uv run python scripts/02_verify.py

The dump of 20261001 was fetched on 2026-10-01 by another script and adopted here with 01_download.py --from, which copies a file only if it has the size and sha256 recorded when it was fetched. The server is slow; that night allCountries.zip took about 50 minutes.

Licence

CC BY 4.0, as the dump's readme.txt says: "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License". Credit GeoNames with a link or another reference, for example:

GeoNames (https://www.geonames.org/), CC BY 4.0

The files under raw/ are GeoNames' own. The Parquet under parquet/ is made from them and changes their form, not their values; LICENSE beside this file lists what was done.