Mythology pet names, with the god named

Zeus is the most registered mythological pet name in this catalogue, which surprises nobody. What is worth knowing is the rest of the field, and what each name actually refers to — a tag that says "mythology" and nothing else is a tag you cannot check.

Every name here is recorded against a specific figure: Freya as the Norse goddess of love, Bastet as the Egyptian cat goddess, Fenrir as the wolf of Ragnarok. That is what makes the tag auditable rather than atmospheric.

A note on cats and Egypt

Bastet, Isis and Anubis carry a lot of weight for a small animal, and the registers show people choosing them anyway. Worth saying plainly: nothing in this data supports the idea that a mythological name suits a temperament. It suits a story you want to tell.

Which is not a criticism — telling a story about an animal is most of what a name is for. It just means the story is yours, assembled by you, and the register has no opinion on whether it fits.

Denser than it looks

50 names, averaging 217 registrations each — well above the catalogue middle. Mythology is not an obscure choice in the registers: Zeus sits inside the twenty most registered names in the catalogue, and Athena, Hercules and Loki are all ordinary choices behind it.

The tag skews male, 28 to 17, which reflects which figures people reach for rather than anything about the names. 27 of the 50 are two syllables and 15 run to three or more — longer than the catalogue average, which is the one place these pay a price for their grandeur.

The male skew has a fairly plain explanation and it isn't about naming. It's about which figures got the most retelling: the thunder gods and the war gods and the heroes with their own films, who happen to be overwhelmingly male in the traditions these registers reach. The goddesses are there and they're less famous, which is a fact about transmission rather than about mythology.

Check the figure before the sound

Every name here is filed against a specific deity or hero, recorded so the tag can be audited. That matters more with mythology than with any other theme, because the stories are not all flattering: Loki is a trickster, Medusa was punished, Icarus fell. The referent is written down precisely so you can decide whether you want it.

7 of the 50 carry a meaning read off a cited page. Where a figure has no dictionary entry the field is empty rather than filled with a summary of the myth, because a myth is not a definition.

Nothing in this data connects a mythological name to a temperament. A dog called Ares is a dog with a name, and any site telling you the name suits a guarding breed is offering an opinion with a filter attached.

The one story worth checking properly is the ending. A surprising number of these figures came to a bad end, and while nobody sensible thinks a name is a forecast, you'll be saying this word for fifteen years and it's better to know now than to find out from a stranger at the park.

Grandeur costs you syllables

15 of this tag run to three syllables or more, which is high, and it's the practical drawback of the whole category.

The reason is straightforward: a god's name was built to be intoned rather than shouted. It wants weight, so it gets length, and length is exactly what distance removes. What arrives at forty metres is the first syllable and a suggestion of the rest.

So the household will shorten it. Hercules becomes Herc, Persephone becomes Percy, and if you haven't chosen which one, three people will choose three different ones and the animal will learn none of them properly.

Decide on day one. Say the full name, then say the version you'd actually shout, and check the short form stands up on its own — starts hard, ends audibly, sounds like nothing else in the house. The full name then does the job long names do best, which is sounding magnificent indoors.

If you'd rather not deal with it at all, 14 of the tag are four letters or fewer. Zeus, Thor and Nyx need no management whatsoever.

Which traditions the registers actually hold

Greek and Roman figures dominate, and there is a straightforward reason: the source list is North American-heavy by record count, so what gets counted is what gets used in North America. Norse names appear, Egyptian and Hindu figures appear more thinly, and traditions outside that reach barely appear at all.

That is a limit of the sample and not a statement about the names. 191 names in the whole catalogue have a recorded Greek origin and 217 a Latin one, but the origin field is recorded rather than inferred, so most of these have no language recorded even where the figure is obviously Greek.

So read this list as which myths the counted cities reach for, and treat the absence of a tradition as an absence of data. The regional breakdown on the popular-names page shows the same bias from a different angle.

It's worth being blunt about the consequence. If you're looking for figures from a tradition that isn't in that sample, this page will look emptier than the world is, and you shouldn't read that emptiness as a verdict on anything. The names exist; these particular councils didn't count them.

Naming an animal after a god

The appeal is obvious and the practice is older than any of these registers, so it's worth saying what actually works about it.

First, the sound. These names were designed to be said aloud with conviction by people addressing something enormous, which is a decent brief for a word you'll shout across a field. They start hard, they carry, and they don't sound like any other word in the house.

Second, the gap. Most of the pleasure comes from the distance between the name and the animal — a thunder god who is frightened of the hoover, a goddess of the hunt who cannot catch a moth. That joke doesn't wear out, because the animal keeps supplying fresh evidence.

Third, the explanation cost, which is the only real drawback. You'll be asked where the name comes from more often than with an ordinary name, and you'll want an answer shorter than the myth. Most people settle on one sentence within a month and stop thinking about it.

Mythology is a tag, not an origin

These are two separate fields on this site and they get confused constantly, so it is worth ten lines.

An origin is a claim about a word: a cited source says this name derives from Greek, or Latin, or Nordic. The mythology tag is a claim about a reference: this name points at a named figure, and the figure is written down so somebody can check it.

A name can carry both, either or neither, and plenty here carry only the tag. Most of these figures have no dictionary entry stating a language at all, so their origin field sits empty even where the tradition is obvious — which looks like an error and is the rule working correctly.

Practically, that means this page and the Greek origin page answer different questions. If you want figures, stay here, because this tag reaches across pantheons. If you want a Greek-sounding name that is not a god, the origin page is much larger and far less loaded.

Where the uncrowded figures are

The famous end of this tag is genuinely busy. Zeus, Loki, Athena and Thor are common enough that you'll meet others, and in some parks you'll meet several.

24 of the 50 sit in the rare band, and this is one of the better tags to go hunting in, because an unfamiliar god's name still sounds like a name. It carries the same weight as the famous ones and comes without the company.

The trade is that nobody will recognise it. An uncommon mythological name reads as an unusual, slightly grand word rather than as a reference, which most owners find is the better of the two experiences anyway.