Urbanization is one of the essential characteristics of our civilization in the 20th-21st centuries and one of the visible trends in the globalized world. Being a diverse and multi-aspectual phenomenon, urbanization resulted in coinage of numerous urban names which make a segment of the language picture of the world. Due to the impact of social, demographic, technological factors urbanization is accompanied by opposite trends of deurbanization and rururbanization which make the phenomenon more complicated cognitively and trigger further conceptualization and categorization of the information within urbanism. Thereby cognition of urbanization and structuring of the relevant information resulted into the frame URBANIZATION / URBAN SPRAWL which spans a number of concepts such as URBAN GEOGRAPHY, URBAN PLANNING, URBAN DESIGN, URBAN ENVIRONMENT, URBAN RENEWAL, URBAN SUSTAINABILITY, URBAN ARCHITECTURE, URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE, URBAN MOBILITY, URBAN DWELLING, URBAN NANOTECH, INTELLIGENT URBANIZATION, URBAN IMAGE MAKING, CITY PROMOTION discussed by many high-caliber specialists and researchers at numerous world forums. History and peculiarities of the urbanization in Great Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are taken as a fundamental extralinguistic background of the English urban names formation. The study of loanwords, particularly of Greek, Latin, French and Italian origin and the ways of their assimilation in different historical periods is based on the relevancy of prestige and conservatism as prominent factors for foreign language infusions into English urban names group. Loan-words make the historical core of English urban names, in the 20th-21st centuries English language resources are used for urban naming. The newly coined names that denote city units are predominately formed via contamination, reduplication, derivation, blending, lexical-semantic analogy, association. Metaphoric urban names are also analyzed. Urban names are formed with the help of cognitive mechanisms and verbalize different cognitive units, namely, frames, concepts, prototypes.
