Somewhere between the dog called Biscuit and the dog called Zeus is the dog called Henry, and Henry is the commoner case. 2,974 names in this catalogue are ones English Wiktionary lists as a given name for a person — the largest single group here, and the one most naming sites treat as a category rather than the default.
Why this page exists at all
Because it is the honest answer to a gap. This site classifies a name by what it points at — a food, a place, a colour, a figure from myth — and that covers 120 food names, 48 mythological ones, 37 colours and so on. It reaches about a quarter of the catalogue and it will never reach much more, because the rest point at nothing. Cooper is not a reference. Riley is not a theme. They are names.
What they are instead is checkable, and the check is somebody else's: the dictionary states it in the entry. “A male given name transferred from the surname” for Cooper, “A unisex given name” for Riley. Nothing here is inferred from how a name looks.
What the registers show
These names average 160 registrations each, which is roughly double the catalogue as a whole. That is not surprising in hindsight: the pool of human names is old, large and already familiar to everyone naming an animal, so it supplies both the crowded top of the list and a long tail.
1,204 of them measure female and 1,139 male. 1,932 are two syllables — the shape people reach for in a name they will call across a garden.
The argument against, and what the data says about it
The objection to human names for animals is that a vet's waiting room becomes confusing and a child called Max will one day meet the dog. Neither is measurable here, and neither is rare enough to have stopped anybody: these names are the most registered group in the catalogue by a wide margin.
The objection that is measurable is collision. A human name is more likely to be shared, and the crowding is at the top: the most registered of them appear thousands of times across eleven registers. If you want a human name that a park will not answer to, the rare band holds 1,756 of them.
What this cannot tell you
Whether a name is a human name in your language. The check is English Wiktionary, so it finds the names English documents as given names — which over-represents English, and misses names that are ordinary given names somewhere the dictionary covers thinly. A blank here means nobody has checked, not that the name is unused by people.
It also says nothing about whether you should. That is the one question every naming site answers confidently and no register has an opinion about.
Is it normal to give a pet a human name?
It is the commonest case in these registers: 2,974 names here are ones a dictionary lists as a given name for a person, and they average 160 registrations each against roughly half that across the catalogue.
What are the most popular human names for pets?
Lucky, Cooper, Riley, Ollie and Henry lead the group in these registers. The list on this page is ordered by how many animals carry each name.
How do you know a name is a human name?
English Wiktionary says so in the entry — “A male given name transferred from the surname”, and similar. Nothing is inferred from how a name looks, and a name nobody has checked is left unmarked rather than guessed at.
Which human names are rare?
1,756 of them sit in the very-unique band. A human name is likelier than most to be shared, so the rare end is where to look if a park full of dogs answering at once is the thing you want to avoid.
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.