145 Meeting Room Name Ideas (with a Naming Framework) · L...

There is a stage in the life of every growing office, usually around room number five, where naming the next meeting room stops being fun and starts being awkward. The first four were easy. The themed pattern made sense. Now you have run out of philosophers, or planets, or whatever you started with, and the next room is going to be called Apollo 14 and people are going to look at you funny.

This post is the field guide we wish someone had given us. A naming framework that holds up past room five. The seven mistakes everyone makes the first time. And 145 name ideas, organised by theme, so you can shortlist in ten minutes rather than spend a fortnight in Slack arguments.

The naming framework, in four rules

Before you brainstorm names, agree on these four rules. They will save you a lot of revisiting the decision later.

One theme, picked for scale. Whatever theme you choose, it has to have at least three times as many candidates as you currently have rooms. If you have five rooms, you want at least fifteen comfortable options on the longlist. Otherwise the theme runs out at exactly the wrong moment.
Capacity encoded somewhere. The name does not have to scream the capacity, but the signage outside the room should. The friendly name is for memory. The "fits 6 people" is for the person trying to book at 9:55am. Most teams write it as "Library (6)" on the door and just "Library" in the calendar.
Pronounceable in two languages. If you have anyone in your office whose first language is not English, or you have an international client base, pick names that survive being said aloud by a French sales lead or a German engineer. "Whakaari" is a beautiful name. Half your team will not say it out loud.
Neutral, not divisive. The room you name after a controversial figure will end up being the room nobody wants to book the meeting in. Same goes for inside jokes that age badly. Save those for the project channels.

Once those four are agreed, the actual brainstorm is short.

Seven mistakes to avoid

From running this exercise with several dozen offices, these are the failure modes that come up over and over.

The "Greek gods" trap. Easy for the first three. Then you run out of recognisable ones and start having to explain who Hephaestus is to everyone in induction.
The "famous tech people" trap. Apple, Jobs, Musk, Bezos. Quietly ages badly. Even when it does not, the name becomes a small daily test of how you feel about the person right now.
The "all in one office" trap. Naming all rooms after London neighbourhoods looks great until you open a second office, also in London. Or until you open in Berlin.
Cute single-word names that confuse people. "The Lab" is fine. "Cloud" sounds like the IT room. "Sandbox" sounds like the dev environment.
Movie or band references nobody under 30 gets. Or, just as bad, nobody over 30.
Excessive irony. "The Boardroom of Doom". Funny once. Awkward in a client meeting.
Local in-jokes that do not survive the office move. The room named after the broken vending machine on the third floor will not move with you to the new building.

145 meeting room names, organised by theme

The lists below are sized for at least 15 rooms each, with a few that go to 25. Pick a theme, pick your names, double check they pass the four rules above.

Literary classics (15)

Library, Gatsby, Atticus, Pemberley, Frodo, Hogwarts, Narnia, Brontë, Austen, Orwell, Hemingway, Wonderland, Sherlock, Sahara, Pip.

World cities (20)

London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Madrid, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Reykjavik, Cape Town, Sydney, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Singapore, Bangkok, Vienna, Prague, Dublin, Helsinki, Auckland.

Famous inventors (15)

Tesla, Edison, Curie, Lovelace, Turing, Newton, Faraday, Hopper, Babbage, Wright, Bell, Galileo, Hawking, Goodall, Mendel.

Nature and landscapes (20)

Forest, Glacier, Canyon, Meadow, Reef, Tundra, Savannah, Mangrove, Fjord, Plateau, Dune, Oasis, Atoll, Estuary, Coral, Lagoon, Ridge, Valley, Summit, Grove.

Music and instruments (15)

Encore, Concerto, Sonata, Rhapsody, Octave, Treble, Cadence, Fugue, Andante, Vivace, Quartet, Overture, Crescendo, Reverb, Aria.

Local landmarks (template, 15 example slots)

This is the format if your offices are in a specific city. London example: Thames, Tower, Battersea, Greenwich, Camden, Soho, Mayfair, Shoreditch, Marylebone, Notting Hill, Hampstead, Richmond, Holborn, Spitalfields, Borough. Replace with the equivalents for your city.

Science concepts (15)

Atom, Quantum, Vector, Photon, Helix, Quark, Gravity, Orbit, Prism, Catalyst, Enzyme, Synapse, Eclipse, Aurora, Spectrum.

Films, recognisable to most audiences (15)

Casablanca, Metropolis, Inception, Amelie, Tampopo, Spirited, Roma, Coco, Up, Lawrence, Goodfellas, Vertigo, Parasite, Whiplash, Arrival.

Famous explorers and journeys (15)

Amundsen, Shackleton, Magellan, Polo, Cousteau, Earhart, Hillary, Norgay, Da Gama, Drake, Hudson, Cabot, Tasman, Battuta, Tereshkova.

Encoding capacity without ruining the name

The compromise that works is "friendly name in the calendar, capacity on the door". So in Outlook or Google the room is "Library", but the sign outside says "Library (6)" and shows the floor plan icon for whatever AV is in there.

If you want the capacity in the calendar too (it makes Room Finder more useful), the trick is to put it in the room mailbox metadata, not the name. Set-Place -Identity "Library" -Capacity 6 in M365 will put the capacity in Outlook's Room Finder without making your room name ugly. We covered the full Room Finder setup in our M365 Room Mailboxes checklist.

The 30-minute naming workshop

If you want to run this as a quick session with the office manager and one or two colleagues, here is the format that takes 30 minutes.

5 minutes: agree the four rules above.
10 minutes: each person picks two theme candidates from the list above (or proposes their own). Take a quick vote.
10 minutes: longlist 15 names in the chosen theme. Anyone can veto, no explanation needed.
5 minutes: assign the first N names to the actual rooms. Hold the remaining names in a Notion or shared doc for future rooms.

The "hold the remaining names" step is the one most teams skip and later regret. It is the difference between a tidy naming convention and a slow drift into chaos by room number eight.

A few names to skip

Universal experience tells us these come up in every brainstorm and are almost always regretted within a year.

"The Innovation Room". The room where no innovation happens.
"The War Room". Reads badly in any actual crisis.
"The Boardroom". Implies it cannot be used for anything else, then sits empty 70 percent of the time.
"The Quiet Room". The first hour-long video call held in it kills the joke.
Any name with "Pod" in it after about 2018. Dates the office.

What to do once you have picked

Naming is the easy part. Making the new names actually stick takes a week or two.

Update the room mailbox names in M365 or Google. Old names will hang around in Outlook autocomplete for weeks otherwise.
Update the signage outside each room. Print, even temporary, beats digital "going up next week".
Send one office-wide email with the old name to new name map. Pin it in the office-management Slack channel.
Update floor plans, induction docs, the wiki page about meeting rooms.
Update the room display configuration to show the new name.

If you want to make the new names harder to forget, put them on the display outside the room with the capacity and AV details visible. That is the single most effective onboarding tool for new joiners.

TL;DR

Pick one theme that has 3x your current room count in candidates. Encode capacity on the door, not in the name. Pronounceable in two languages. Neutral. Avoid the seven mistakes (Greek gods running out, tech founders ageing badly, single-office geography, confusing single-word names, dated references, ironic names, in-jokes). Pick from the 145 options above by theme. Run the 30-minute workshop, hold the spare names for the next rooms, and update both the room mailbox and the signage on the same day.

145 Meeting Room Name Ideas That Won't Make Your Office Cringe (Plus a Naming Framework)