Most letters in this catalogue end their names in -a, -o or -y, and the -i ending is a rarity everywhere. Not here: 34 of this letter ends in -i, a larger share than any other initial produces. Yogi, Yoshi, Yuki, Yumi, Yuri. The reason is that a large part of this letter is Japanese.
Where the letter comes from
Yoshi, Yuki, Yumi, Yuna, Yuri — Japanese. Yoda and Yogi — borrowed characters. There is very little native English here, and the letter is small as a result: 153 names, at 29 registrations each, which is among the very thinnest use any initial gets.
Short, and two beats
71 of these are four letters or fewer and 108 are two syllables. Japanese names arrive in English at exactly the shape English already prefers for a pet, which is a large part of why they travel as well as they do.
An initial Y is a vowel wearing a hat
The sound is a glide into whatever follows, so it adds no attack to a name at all. What you get instead is distinctiveness on the page: an initial almost nobody uses, on names that are short, easy to say and already familiar to anyone who has met one.
What are good pet names starting with Y?
Yogi, Yoshi, Yoda, Yuki and Yumi lead the list, ordered by registrations across eleven public registers.
Why do Y pet names sound Japanese?
Because many of them are. Yoshi, Yuki, Yumi, Yuna and Yuri are Japanese, and it is why 34 of the letter ends in -i — a larger share of that ending than any other initial in the catalogue.
Are Y names rare?
Among the rarest in use: 153 names at 29 registrations each, which puts the letter at the bottom of the alphabet alongside U and Q.
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.