One of my favorite parts of pregnancy is finding baby names. My husband and I always joked that in a cartoon world with no problems, practicality, or consequences, we would just keep having babies so we could keep naming them. But alas, since humans are not hamsters (great news for babies who don’t want to be eaten, BTW), I will never be able to give all the awesome names backlogged in my brain to actual children.
Juniper, Carmen, Malcolm, and Cormac, we hardly knew ye!
But we are given some opportunities to redirect that energy: pets! And judging from the 2024 Pet Name Study from TrustedHousesitters.com, it seems that some of us might just be using baby names that didn’t make the final cut (or are testing out future baby names) for our fur-babies.
“Each year, our Pet Name Study reveals fascinating insights into the names that pet owners choose for their beloved companions,” said TrustedHousesitters Head of Community Angela Laws. “With over 15 years of experience working with pets and their owners across the country, I’ve had a front-row seat to the evolving trends in pet naming, so it’s thrilling to see how our data captures the popular pet names this year.”
The site — which offers unlimited pet or house sitting for an annual membership fee — analyzed over 200,000 pet names registered on its platform. While that’s just a fraction of the almost 90 million dogs and 74 million cats, it’s nevertheless quite a lot of data and the picture it paints is really interesting.
Half the names on lists of Top 20 dog and cat names also appeared on the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) list of Top 100 Baby Names for 2023. Admittedly, we took a little creative liberty by equating “Charlie” with Charles or Charlotte” and “Bella” with “Isabella,” but I don’t think that’s a dramtic reach.
So it seems that the days of naming your dog Shadow and your cat Frisky may be over, at least for now. Here’s what we’re collectively opting for instead…
Top 20 Dog Names
Of the top 20 dog names, 11 were also names in the Top 100 baby names of 2023, the latest year for which we have data. Eight ranked among the Top 50 and five were in the Top 20.
Top 20 Cat Names
While there’s a lot of overlap between cat and dog lists — with Luna and Lucy both appearing in the top 3 for each — it seems that cats demand a bit more creativity than dogs (which anyone who’s ever interacted with a cat probably doesn’t find all that surprising).
Nevertheless, parallels to the world of baby naming remain: seven top cat names can be found in the Top 20 per the SSA and nine are in the Top 50.
But wait! There’s more!
I did a little bit of digging into the SSA data and it seems that most of the names that are not in the Top 100 currently are nevertheless rising in the baby name charts (the SSA website lets you look at the Top 1,000 baby names in the country). Names like Daisy, Rosie, Milo, Maggie (via Margaret), Cleo, and Frankie have become more popular for human babies since 1980.
(Question: if pets are fur-babies, does that mean our children are… skin-babies?) Only a few — Lola, Max, Bailey, Oscar, and Simon — appear to be on the downswing.
So I guess the moral of this story is that whether you’re a human, a cat, or a dog, a good name for one is a good name for all.
