Sometimes the animal is decided and the species is not: a female pet is arriving and the name has to work either way. These are the names the records sex female regardless of what kind of animal carried them. For one species, see female dog names or female cat names.
How female naming differs, measured
Put the two halves of the catalogue side by side and the differences are consistent rather than impressionistic. 1,472 of the 3,400 female names end in -a, against 786 of the 3,927 male ones ending in -o — the female preference for an open final vowel is the stronger of the two patterns.
Sound follows: soft is the largest group among female names at 1,236, where easy-to-call leads the male ones at 1,834. And length differs at the top: 704 female names run to three syllables against 493 male ones, which is why female lists read longer even when the top twenty look similar.
Fewer names, more per name
There are fewer female names than male ones — 3,400 against 3,927 — and they average 86 registrations each against 94. Both gaps come from the source data rather than from naming: more sexed shelter records are male, so the male side of every measurement here rests on a slightly larger sample.
That is worth holding in mind whenever you compare the two lists. The difference between them is partly a difference in what the shelters recorded.
Choosing across species
A name that has to work before the species is settled is a real constraint, and the registers make it navigable: the names appearing in both the dog and cat halves of this catalogue are the ones already proven in both. A name common only among cats may sit oddly on a large dog, and the record counts on each name page show which animals its own registrations came from.
The other cross-species consideration is volume. A cat is called from across a room and a dog from across a field, so a name chosen for an unknown animal should pass the harder test: say it at a shout and hear whether the ending survives.
Two things this list does not measure
Whether a name suits an individual animal — which no dataset can answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a personality quiz. And how the balance would look outside these registers: gender comes from shelter records, which are overwhelmingly American, so the female-male split measured here is a fact about those shelters first.
The blank cases matter too. A name can be very well counted and carry no gender at all, because the licence registers that supply most counts record no sex whatsoever. An empty gender field means the sexed sample was too thin, not that the name is neutral.
How does this site know a name is female?
From how real animals carrying it were sexed in shelter records: female at 65% or more of a sample of at least five. Below that floor a name carries no gender rather than a guess.
Why do some very common names have no gender?
Because the registers that supply most of the counts record no sex at all. Gender comes from the shelter datasets, so a name common in licence data but rare in shelters can be well counted and still unsexed.
How does female naming differ from male?
1,472 of the 3,400 female names end in -a and soft is the largest sound group; male names lean towards consonant endings and easy-to-call. Both patterns hold across all eleven registers.
Why are there fewer female names?
3,400 against 3,927, because more sexed shelter records are male. It is a property of shelter intake rather than of naming.
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.