Not a general suggestion and partly redundant with existing lists, but maybe useful for some in some contexts as prepared separate lists. A few quick ones I use for Earth start, real stars, exploration-heavy games to rename catalogue stars in a certain arm/region when I'm lazy:
Geographical or political subdivisions of real Earth countries. With slight modifications in some cases (split up double regions, no "Federal District" or "County of x" etc., ...).
Brazilian states (entries: 26)
Chinese provinces (33; with a second file in Chinese for those who can read it or for those who can't, but want unintelligible alien things to be labelled really unintelligibly alien)
French provinces (49)
Indian states (41)
Italian regions (22)
Spanish communities (19)
When extra lazy I use real city names from those subdivisions or variations thereof for colony names in the corresponding systems.
I'm currently playing a united-Earth-based ex-Communist, by now federal-ultra-capitalist three-species empire that is increasingly driven by a growing religion: a mystical belief in the "Ancients", a distant benevolent civilization of superior beings that has been buzzing around the galaxy for much longer than humanity and its warring neighbours. That inspires a mad rush of exploration, even by my generally so-inclined standards. [Setup: Conventional start, but with a distant starting NPR and for the first half-century or so: significantly increased NPR-NPR generation rate. One of these decades, that should lead to finding a well-developed region of space with decades of head-start in research and expansion. Once we get there.] Old guard Communists and Socialists, still strong on Earth, Luna and Utopia, usually doubt that the "Ancients" exist or even dare to ask the heretical question: What if they exist, but are not benevolent at all...? We shall see: 332 known systems and counting fusion-faster soon. And impatient to play Aurora after a hiatus, I'm running out of suitable naming ideas.
edit: minor copy-in-haste fix
