Only 360 cat names end in -o, which makes this one of the smaller slices on the site. It is also one of the busiest: 163 registrations per name against 140 across all cat names. Few names, a lot of cats each.
Short, and shorter
121 of them are four letters or fewer, and those average 258 registrations — the heaviest small corner in the cat catalogue. Milo, Leo, Coco, Theo: four letters, two beats, at least one hard consonant apiece.
It reads male here too
269 measure male against 29 female. The ending does the same work on a cat that it does on a dog, over a much smaller set of names — which is the interesting part, because it means the reading is in the sound rather than in the species.
What the density means for you
A slice this concentrated is a slice where the good ones are taken. That is not an argument against them: a name used heavily is a name with evidence behind it. It does mean you should expect company, and it means checking the count on a name before you commit rather than after.
Why are there so few cat names ending in -o?
360 of them, against 753 ending in -a. The ending arrives in English marked masculine, and fewer of the cats in these registers were given a name marked that way.
Are they popular?
Heavily used for their number: 163 registrations per name against 140 across all cat names, rising to 258 for the four-letter ones.
Do they suit male cats?
That is how they have been used — 269 male to 29 female. Nothing in the registers says a female cat minds.
Every count on this site is a tally of real registrations: pet licences and shelter intakes published as open data by New York, Seattle, Austin, Montgomery County, Cambridge, Zurich, Basel and four Australian councils. Popularity here is the average share a name holds across those registers, so a name common in a small city is not buried by one common in a large one. Five of the eleven registers are North American and they supply 86% of the records, so read the ordering as naming in those places rather than worldwide. Browse the whole catalogue or read how the data is put together.