Cat names

Cats are named differently from dogs and the registers show it: shorter, more absurd, far more likely to end in a vowel. The names below are the ones that appear most often in records where the animal is a cat.

Sex is recorded here only where real animals were sexed — at least 65% of a sample of five or more — so a name with too few records carries no gender rather than a guess.

The shape of the list follows from that. Fewer distinct names are recorded for cats than for dogs, so this is the concentrated core of naming rather than its long tail — everybody is drawing from a smaller pot, and the top of the list is correspondingly crowded.

If that crowding bothers you, read downwards rather than away. The same shape that makes the famous names work — two beats, open ending, nothing hard in the middle — runs the whole length of the list, and the far end of it is full of names nobody at your vet's has heard.