Short and unusual are the two things people ask for most often and they pull against each other: short names are used more, so most short names are crowded. 2,141 names manage both, at 23 registrations each.
What a name has to be to land here
933 of them are a single syllable and 718 classify strong-sounding — the shape you get when four letters end in a consonant. Bam, Chi, Big, Fig.
They are not invented. Every one is carried by a real animal in a public register, which is why the list contains things an editor would never have written down.
The honest caveat
A short name nobody uses is sometimes short and good, and sometimes short and awkward — and the archive cannot hear the difference. 362 of these are names a dictionary lists for people, which is the closest thing to a sanity check available here.
Read the shortlist aloud before committing. That is the one step this catalogue cannot take for you, and it is the step that separates a find from a curiosity.
Can a name be both short and unique?
2,141 manage it — four letters or fewer and in the measured rare band, at 23 registrations each. Most short names are crowded, so the intersection is smaller than either list.
Are these real names?
Every one is carried by a real animal in a public register. Nothing here was invented to sound unusual.
How many are one syllable?
933 of them, and 718 classify strong-sounding — the profile of four letters ending in a consonant.
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.