The male dog names below are ordered by how often they turn up in public registers, which is a different list from the one you get by asking people what they like. Owners describe their taste and then register something else.
Short names win outdoors
A name you can say in under half a second is a name you can say twice before your dog looks away. Four letters or fewer, one or two syllables — the catalogue computes this from the spelling rather than judging it, so the filter is exact.
A note on names that sound like commands
Kit and sit, Bo and no, Jay and stay: a name that rhymes with a cue makes both harder to teach. It is the one rule in naming that trainers agree on, and it rules out more good names than any question of style.
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.