G has two pronunciations and this catalogue sorts them neatly by meaning. The soft G names are people: George, Georgie, Ginger, Gigi. The hard G names are objects and creatures: Gizmo, Ghost, Gucci, Goose. Same letter, two vocabularies.
Why the split lines up that way
The soft G reaches English through French and Latin, which is also the route most given names took. The hard G is the older Germanic sound, which is where the plain nouns live. Two thousand years of borrowing, visible in a list of dog names.
The letter as a whole
420 names, at 68 registrations each — a middling letter by size and by use. 160 measure male against 120 female, and 112 classify soft-sounding, which is the hard-G-and-liquid combination rather than the soft G.
Where the shortlist should start
Decide which G you want before you open the list, because the filter will not do it for you. If the name is going to be called outdoors, the hard G is the one with an edge on it; if it is going to be said across a room, the soft G is doing something closer to what a person's name does.
What are the most popular pet names starting with G?
Gizmo, Gracie, George and Gigi lead the list, which is ordered by registrations across eleven public registers.
Is G a hard or soft letter in pet names?
Both, and the split is not random: the soft-G names in this catalogue are overwhelmingly people's names, while the hard-G ones are objects and creatures.
Are G names male or female?
Slightly male — 160 against 120 — though the soft-G half of the letter leans the other way.
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.