Nature pet names: plants, weather and stone

Nature names sit well on animals for an obvious reason: they're concrete.

Willow, Storm, Pebble, Juniper — each of them a thing you can see, which is more than most naming fashions manage.

Flowers have their own list

Plant names are numerous enough to separate out, and the flower tag records which plant, so it can be checked.

A small tag with heavy names in it

154 names carry the nature theme and they average 260 registrations each — denser than the short-name slice at 74 and denser than the rare band at 91.

Nature names aren't a niche: Willow, Storm and Pebble are mainstream choices that happen to be classifiable.

A tag that only admits names pointing at real things ends up admitting mostly plain nouns, which is why Willow, Storm and Pebble are in it and a name that merely sounds outdoorsy isn't.

Why a concrete name works better than an abstract one

The word concrete is doing real work in that first sentence, and it's worth unpacking.

A name that points at a thing has a shape somebody else can picture, which means it never needs explaining and can't be misunderstood. A name that points at a quality — brave, gentle, wild — is asking the listener to imagine something, and asking the animal to live up to it.

It also ages differently. A quality can stop being true and a thing can't: an animal named after a stone is named after a stone for the whole of its life, whatever it turns out to be like, where an animal named for boldness at eight weeks may be nothing of the sort at two.

And concrete words are usually better built. The names of things people see every day are short, worn smooth and unambiguous, for the same reason food words are — constant use does that to a word, and abstraction doesn't get the same treatment.

The gender skew, and the reason for it

84 of the 154 measure female against 34 male, with the rest unisex or unsexed.

Plants and weather skew female in these registers; stone and water rather less so. It's a fact about choice, and the site records it without explaining it, because no source we have explains it.

31 of them classify soft-sounding against 31 strong. If you want a nature name that carries outdoors rather than indoors, the strong ones are where to look.

The four kinds of nature name

The tag mixes several quite different vocabularies, and separating them makes the list far easier to use.

Plants are the largest group and the softest — open vowels, longer words, the strongest female reading in the theme. They read gentle and they carry indoors.

Weather is the opposite: short, hard, dramatic, and the best-shaped part of the theme for a name you'll shout. It also suits an animal with some energy, which plant names don't.

Stone and mineral sits between them and is the most underused. These are short concrete words with hard consonants and no gender reading at all, which is close to the ideal profile — and there are a great many more of them than anybody has used.

Landscape and season supplies the longer, grander names. They suit a large or dignified animal and they need the usual caution about length, since a three-beat name gets shortened.

Why this theme keeps growing

Nature names have been rising steadily wherever anybody measures naming, human or animal, and the reasons are worth noting because they suggest the trend has some distance left in it.

Part of it is a move away from human given names generally. A word-name says something the owner chose, where a borrowed given name says something a previous century chose, and nature is the largest supply of pleasant words available.

Part of it is that the theme is inexhaustible in a way most aren't. Pop culture runs out and dates; royal titles are a handful of words; nature has effectively no floor, which means it can absorb decades of naming without becoming crowded at the level of individual names.

And part of it is that the names work. A theme that produces short concrete pleasant words that spell themselves will keep being chosen regardless of fashion, because the practical properties are doing as much work as the sentiment is.

None of which this catalogue can measure over time — the registers are a snapshot and carry no dates. It's an observation from elsewhere, offered as an explanation and flagged as one.

Picking one that stays specific

The strength of a nature name is that it points at something.

That's also where it goes wrong: a name naming a thing you chose for a reason keeps the reason, and a name naming a thing at random is just a word. Willow for the tree outside the window is a different name from Willow because it was on a list.

The tag records which plant, weather or mineral each name refers to, so you can check before you choose rather than discovering later that the pretty word means something you wouldn't have picked. That's the whole reason the referent is written down.

For calling, the split inside this tag is useful. Plant names lean soft and carry indoors; weather and stone lean strong and carry outdoors. Both are in the same list, and the sound filter separates them.

Where the unused nature names are

The theme is as large as the outdoors and the tag holds a very small part of it.

Trees beyond the obvious ones are the deepest seam, and they're excellent names — short, sturdy, mostly unisex, and they suit a large animal in a way a flower doesn't.

Minerals and stones come next. There are hundreds with short usable names, most of them never used, and they carry a colour and a texture along with the word.

Landscape features — the words for particular kinds of hill, valley, water and ground, especially the old regional ones — are a large vocabulary that's almost entirely free, and several of them are lovely.

Weather in all its specificity is the last: not just storm and rain but the words for particular winds, frosts, mists and skies, most of which nobody has thought of as a name.

Where the tag is silent

On whether a nature name suits a coat colour, a breed or a temperament — nothing in this catalogue connects those.

Colour in particular was left out deliberately: a white dog called Nina says nothing about the name, so the colour columns in the source datasets are ignored.

And on the names in the catalogue that feel natural without naming anything. They aren't in this tag, because feeling botanical isn't the same as being a plant, and a tag that admitted both would be worth nothing.

The boundary of the theme is silent too, and it has to be. Whether a mineral counts as nature, whether weather does, whether a season is a thing at all — those are judgements, and every one of them would move the count. The tag holds what a source could classify, which is narrower than the idea and the only version of it anybody can check.