A soft name is one you can say without your voice hardening: it ends in a vowel or in l, m, n or r, and it has no stops in the middle. There are 2,918 of them here. The neighbouring elegant-sounding names overlap but are longer; the themed hub has the rest.
Where a soft name costs you something
Softness and carrying power pull against each other. If most of your calling happens outdoors, a soft name wants a harder short form for work — which is what most owners end up inventing anyway.
What is a soft-sounding pet name?
One ending in a vowel or in a liquid consonant such as l, m, n or r, with no hard stops in the middle. The classification comes from the spelling.
Are soft names better for cats?
Nothing in this data says so. Soft names are more common for cats in the registers, which is a fact about what owners choose, not about what cats respond to.
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 three 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. Nine of the eleven sources are North American, so read the ordering as naming in those places rather than worldwide. Browse the whole catalogue or read how the data is put together.