One of my favorite parts of pregnancy is picking out a name for my baby. My husband and I always joke that in a cartoon world without problems, practicalities, or consequences, we would keep having kids just so we could keep naming them. But alas, since humans aren’t hamsters (which, by the way, is great news for babies who don’t want to be eaten), I’ll never be able to give all the awesome names I have stored in my brain to actual children.
Juniper, Carmen, Malcolm and Cormac, we barely know you!
But we have some opportunities to redirect that energy: pets! Judging from TrustedHousesitters.com’s 2024 Pet Name Study, some of us may just be stuck with baby names that haven’t been finalized (or are testing future ones).
“Each year, our Pet Names Study reveals interesting insights into the names pet owners choose for their beloved companions,” said Angela Laws, community leader at TrustedHousesitters. “With over 15 years of experience working with pets and their owners across the country, ”
The site offers unlimited pet or house sitting for an annual fee. While that’s only a small fraction of the nearly 90 million dogs and 74 million cats, it’s a sizable amount of data, and the picture it paints is quite interesting.
Half of the names on the top 20 dog and cat names list also appear on the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) 2023 Top 100 Baby Names list. ” or “Charlotte,” and “Bella” and “Isabella,” but I don’t think that’s a dramatic effect.
So the days of naming your dog Shadow and your cat Frisky appear to be over, at least for now. This is what we collectively chose…
Top 20 Dog Names
Of the top 20 dog names, 11 names also appear in the top 100 baby names in 2023, the latest year for which we have data. 8 companies ranked in the top 50 and 5 companies ranked in the top 20.
Top 20 Cat Names
While there’s a lot of overlap between the cat and dog lists – Luna and Lucy both appear in the top three – cats seem to require more creativity than dogs (anyone who’s ever interacted with a cat may not have noticed This) is all surprising).
However, similarities to the world of baby naming remain: seven of the top cat names can be found in SSA’s top 20, and nine in the top 50.
But wait! There’s more!
I did some digging into the SSA data, and it seems that most names not in the top 100 are currently moving up the baby name rankings (the SSA website lets you view the top 1,000 baby names). Since 1980, names such as Daisy, Rosie, Milo, Maggie (from Margaret), Cleo and Frankie have become increasingly popular among human babies.
(Question: If pets are fur babies, does that mean our kids are… fur babies?) Only a few — Lola, Max, Bailey, Oscar, and Simon — appear to be in decline.
So I guess the moral of the story is, whether you’re a human, cat, or dog, a good name for one is a good name for all.
