Danish directional adverbs (op ‘up’/ned ‘down’/…) are used extensively in motion events to point at places in landscape (hun løb op til skolen ‘she ran up to the school’). When speakers use the same directional adverbs consistently about a place they establish particular bounded entities that become part of their mental map (the school: ‘up-place’). The directional adverbs are also used in reciprocated place-names (Oppe Sundby ‘Upper Sundby’). In this article, we use data sets on both uses of directional adverbs to examine the process of place-naming in this particular case as well as in general. The analysis suggests that places receiving reciprocated place-names with directional adverbs are places that plausibly already have been subject to a place-making process with directional adverbs in a speech community, and that peculiarities in the proprial use reflect and can be explained by regular patterns in the appellative use. The analysis also demonstrates that basic conceptualisation patterns as well as ground level practice, i.e. recurrent social activity and preconscious mutual agreement between speakers, play a major role in the proprialisation process. In general, the article points to the importance of language as well as culture and cognition in proprialisation processes.