No single authority decides what places are called. Each country maintains its own names board or equivalent, and its decisions bind only its own government. The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names coordinates and advises but explicitly refuses to settle naming disputes. The International Hydrographic Organization sets standards for sea names but has not managed to agree a revision since 1953. In practice, the most visible arbiters today are the map companies, which increasingly resolve disagreements by showing different users different names.
Start with what does not exist
There is no international registry of place names with legal force, no court of toponymy, no body that can rule that a lake is called one thing and not another. This is not an oversight. Names are an attribute of sovereignty, and states have never been willing to hand that particular thing to a committee.
What follows from that is the whole structure of the field. Every naming decision you hear about is a decision by somebody in particular, binding on somebody in particular, and the useful question is always which.
The US Board on Geographic Names, and what it is for
The American body is one of the oldest. President Benjamin Harrison created the Board on Geographic Names by executive order on 4 September 1890, and its purpose has not changed since: to make federal agencies use the same name for the same thing. Before it existed, the Army, the Post Office and the Geological Survey could and did print different names for the same river.
It sits within the Department of the Interior and draws members from six federal departments plus the CIA, the Government Publishing Office, the Library of Congress and the Postal Service. Two standing committees do the work — a Domestic Names Committee and a Foreign Names Committee. Its statutory authority is at 43 U.S.C. 364.
Its output is the Geographic Names Information System, which holds over two million records and is the reference every federal map, chart and document is supposed to follow. When a name changes in GNIS, everything downstream follows — including, as it turns out, Google.
How a name change is supposed to happen
The board does not invent names. It responds to proposals, which can come from federal agencies, state and local governments, tribal governments or any member of the public. Anyone can file one.
Its default is deference to local usage. If people who live near a creek call it something, that is normally what the board makes official, and it discourages changes to established names without a compelling reason. That policy is why a 2006 proposal to rename the Gulf of Mexico was rejected unanimously, and it is the reason executive orders are used for politically driven renamings: they route around a process designed to say no.
The board also enforces a set of small, firm conventions that surprise people. Commemorative names normally require the honouree to have been dead for a period. And possessive apostrophes are almost never permitted in American feature names — there are exactly five standing exceptions, of which Martha's Vineyard is the famous one. Pikes Peak has no apostrophe for this reason.
When the board overrides local usage
The deference rule has one long-standing exception: names determined to be derogatory. That exception has been used repeatedly, and it is the main engine of American place-name change over the past sixty years.
In 1962, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall identified a racial slur used in hundreds of federal names and directed the board to eliminate it. In 1974 the board did the same for a slur for Japanese people. In November 2021, Secretary Deb Haaland issued Secretarial Order 3404 declaring a slur for Native American women derogatory and creating a task force to replace it; at its meeting on 8 September 2022 the board approved 643 name changes at once.
Separately, the board has restored a number of Indigenous names on request: Barrow became Utqiaġvik in 2016, Harney Peak in South Dakota became Black Elk Peak that same year, and Clingmans Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains became Kuwohi in September 2024 at the request of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. That is the context in which the 2025 reversion of Denali to Mount McKinley ran against the grain.
UNGEGN, and the dispute it will not touch
At the international level the relevant body is the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names. It grew out of UN Cartographic Section discussions in the late 1940s, first met in New York in 1960, and held the first UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names in Geneva in 1967. It reports to ECOSOC and meets on a regular cycle.
Its mandate is genuinely useful and genuinely limited. It encourages every country to establish a national names authority, promotes the use of nationally authorised names, publishes romanisation systems so that names in non-Latin scripts transfer consistently, and follows up on resolutions. What it does not do is adjudicate. Its own framing is explicit: the purpose of the conference is not to settle political disputes between states over the use of particular names.
So UNGEGN can tell you how to transliterate a Korean name into the Latin alphabet. It will not tell you whether the sea in question is called the Sea of Japan.
The IHO, and a book that stopped being updated
For seas, the reference work is the International Hydrographic Organization's Limits of Oceans and Seas, which defines the boundaries and names of the world's maritime areas. It matters because charts, forecasts and shipping documents need the same water to mean the same thing.
The problem is its age. The publication, known as S-23, appeared in 1929, was revised in 1937, and reached its third edition in 1953. There has been no agreed fourth edition since, because attempts to produce one collided with the naming disputes the organisation had no way to settle. The 1929 edition had recorded "Japan Sea" at a time when Korea was under Japanese rule and unable to make its case; South Korea formally objected at the UN in 1992, and the revision has been deadlocked ever since.
In 2020 the IHO adopted a workaround: a new standard, S-130, that identifies maritime areas by numeric identifier rather than by name, leaving the label to be attached separately. It is a candid admission that the naming question is unresolvable at that level, and a sensible engineering response to it. Similar deadlock surrounds the Persian Gulf, which the IHO renders as "Gulf of Iran (Persian Gulf)" while Gulf Cooperation Council states use "Arabian Gulf."
Endonyms, exonyms, and why English keeps its own words
Two terms make the rest of this legible. An endonym is the name a place is given in the local language by the people who live there: München, Roma, Nihon, Sverige. An exonym is the name used by outsiders in another language: Munich, Rome, Japan, Sweden.
Exonyms are not errors, and UNGEGN has never asked countries to abandon them. They are what happens when a name is borrowed across a language boundary and then evolves on its own for centuries. English calls Germany by a Latin word that Germans do not use for themselves; German calls France Frankreich. Nobody is misnaming anything.
The reason this matters is that most modern renaming requests are requests to retire an exonym in favour of an endonym. When Turkey asked to be called Türkiye, or Côte d'Ivoire asked not to be translated, or Ukraine asked for Kyiv rather than the Russian-derived Kiev, the ask was for other languages to adopt the local form. Those requests are addressed to governments and publishers one at a time, because there is no lever that pulls them all.
How the map companies became the arbiters
The practical answer to "what is this place called" is now, for most people, whatever their phone says. And the phone follows a rule.
Google's published policy is to follow the official national names database of the country the user is in, determined from the device's SIM, network and locale, or from the region set in search settings. Where two countries disagree, users in each see their own country's name, and everyone else sees both, in the form "Primary (Alternative)." Apple Maps and Bing apply comparable location-dependent labelling.
This is why the 2025 renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and the 2026 renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America propagated to consumer maps within days: the executive orders changed GNIS, and Google follows GNIS for American users automatically. No editorial decision was required.
It also concentrates real influence in very few hands. A national names board can only change its own database; a mapping platform with billions of users decides what most of the planet actually sees, and it does so by rule rather than by judgement. When MapQuest declined to adopt Gulf of America in 2025, it was one of the last cartographic publishers in a position to make that an editorial choice at all.
The consequence is that a place name is no longer a single value. It is a function of who is asking and from where — which is closer to how names have always actually worked than a printed atlas ever was. For the long history of places that have gone through this, see places that changed their names, or the older Indigenous layer beneath many modern maps in place names from Indigenous languages.