The male half of the same measurement: names the shelter records sex male at 65% or more. It is a longer list than the female one, which is a fact about shelter intake rather than about naming. Species-specific lists are at male dog names and male cat names.
How male naming differs, measured
Male names in these registers are shorter and end harder. 753 of the 3,927 are a single syllable against 359 of the 3,400 female ones, and the largest ending group is a consonant rather than a vowel — 1,888 of them, with -o a distant second at 786.
The sound classification agrees: easy-to-call leads at 1,834, strong follows at 668, and soft — the largest group on the female side — comes third. None of this is a claim about male animals. It is a description of what owners picked, repeated consistently across eleven registers on three continents.
The larger sample, and what it means
This is the bigger half of the catalogue: 3,927 names holding 367,176 registrations, against 3,400 and 291,102 on the female side. The reason is prosaic — more sexed shelter records are male — and it has one practical consequence worth naming.
A larger sample means the male measurements are marginally more reliable, not that male animals have more names available to them. Where the two lists disagree about a shared name, the male figure usually rests on more records.
Choosing across species
The shorter, harder shape that dominates male naming works better on a dog than on a cat, and the registers show owners acting on that: the male cat list runs measurably softer than the male dog list. If the species is not yet settled, the middle of this list is safer than either end.
Volume is the second constraint. A name for an animal you have not met should be tested at a shout rather than at a conversational level, because that is where a closed ending helps and a soft one disappears.
Two things this list does not measure
Whether a name suits an individual animal. And whether the male-female split would look the same anywhere else: sexed records come from shelter datasets that are mostly American, so this is a measurement of those shelters before it is a measurement of naming.
There is also a sampling asymmetry worth naming. More sexed shelter records are male, which is why this list is larger than the female one — 3,927 names against 3,400. That is a property of shelter intake, not of how many names are available to male animals.
Is there a male equivalent of a unisex name?
A name is only unisex here when its sexed records land between 35% and 65% female. Those are listed separately in the unisex pet names guide, linked from this hub.
Why are there more male names than female ones?
Because more sexed shelter records are male. It is a property of the source data, not a claim that male animals have more names available to them.
Are male pet names shorter?
Yes, measurably: 753 of the 3,927 are a single syllable against 359 of the 3,400 female names, and the largest ending group is a consonant rather than a vowel.
Is this list more reliable than the female one?
Marginally, and only because it rests on a larger sample — 367,176 registrations against 291,102. More sexed shelter records are male.
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 three 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. Nine of the eleven sources are North American, so read the ordering as naming in those places rather than worldwide. Browse the whole catalogue or read how the data is put together.