Space pet names: moons, stars and the ones people really use

Stella and Luna are both inside the ten most registered pet names in this catalogue, and they mean a star and the moon.

That isn't a fashion; astronomy has sat near the top of every register we count, in three countries, for as long as the data goes back.

Each one names something

The tag records which object or mission a name refers to, which is what makes it auditable — Nova for an exploding star, Apollo for the programme and the god before it. A name that merely sounds cosmic doesn't qualify.

Small tag, heavy names

29 names carry the space tag and they average 327 registrations each, which puts the slice among the four densest in the catalogue.

Space names aren't a niche interest: Stella and Luna are both inside the ten most registered names in the whole catalogue.

The gender split is flat — 13 female to 10 male — which is unusual here, since most tags lean one way by two or three to one. Astronomy doesn't read masculine or feminine in English, so the names go both ways.

21 of the 29 are two syllables and 12 classify easy-to-call. That's the shape of a name that works outdoors, which is part of why these have lasted.

Why astronomy supplies such good names

The density of this tag is worth explaining, because it isn't obvious that a subject this abstract should produce heavily used pet names.

The answer is that astronomical vocabulary was built to be spoken. These are names people have been saying aloud for thousands of years — the moon, the stars, the planets, the figures they were named after — and anything said that often for that long has been worn into a shape mouths find easy. Two beats, open vowels, no awkward clusters.

They also arrive carrying a meaning that's grand without being pompous. A name from the sky suggests something large and permanent, and it does that without demanding anything of the animal — unlike a name meaning brave or noble, which the animal has to live up to and mostly won't.

And they're borrowed rather than invented. Most of them come to English through Latin and Greek, which means they've already been adapted by one language before reaching ours — smoothed twice, which is part of why so few of them are hard to say.

Choosing one that keeps its reference

The tag records which object each name points at, so you can check before you choose.

Luna is the moon, Nova an exploding star, Aurora the polar light, Titan Saturn's largest moon. A name whose referent you actually like is a name you'll still like explaining in ten years.

Where these go wrong is collision. Stella and Luna are both inside the ten most registered names in the catalogue, so a park will contain others. Further down the same list — Nova and Cosmo, both in the low hundreds — is where the theme gets you privacy.

Where to look past the tag

Astronomy is an enormous naming system and the tag holds a very small part of it.

Named stars are the deepest seam by a long way. There are hundreds with individual names, most of them Arabic in origin and most of them short and striking, and almost none has ever been put on an animal.

Moons are the next. The outer planets have dozens each, named out of mythology, which gives you a name that's both a moon and a figure from a story — two meanings for the price of one.

Constellations and the things in them supply names with shape and history, and several are short enough to call across a field.

Spaceflight is the modern seam: missions, craft, landing sites, and the animals and people who went first. It's small, it's specific, and it has the advantage of referring to something that actually happened.

Words for phenomena — the terms for what light, gravity and time do out there — are the most abstract and the least used, and some of them are beautiful words in their own right.

The names that are also something else

A large share of this tag has a second life, and it explains why the well-used ones are used so heavily.

Astronomy took most of its vocabulary from mythology, which means a great many space names are also gods, heroes and monsters. Apollo is a programme, a god and a spacecraft; the moons of the outer planets are almost entirely populated by figures out of Greek and Roman stories.

Several are also ordinary human given names, which is the other reason they read so naturally. A name that a person could be called and that also means a star has two independent routes to sounding like a name, and that's exactly the profile of the ones at the top of this list.

The practical use of that is in choosing. If you want a space name that needs no explaining, pick one with a second life — it'll be spelled correctly and read as a name by everybody who hasn't thought about the sky. If you want one nobody has, pick from the corners of astronomy that mythology never reached.

The reference nobody will get

A caution that applies to this theme more than most, because it's easy to choose a name here that you love and nobody can read.

The named stars in particular are unfamiliar to almost everybody, which cuts both ways. You get a name nobody else has and a name you'll be explaining — how to spell it, what it is, why — at every vet visit and every introduction for the animal's whole life.

That's fine if you enjoy it and wearing if you don't. The usual test applies: say the name to somebody who doesn't know the reference and see whether it works as a name on its own. If it does, the astronomy is a bonus; if it only works once explained, you've chosen a fact rather than a name.

The names at the top of this tag pass that test easily, which is precisely why they're at the top. Luna and Stella work perfectly as names for anybody who has never thought about the sky.

Why the list stops where it does

Because a name carries one style label, not several.

Comet, Sirius and Vega are astronomy words that landed under a different label or arrived with none at all, so they're in the catalogue without being in this list. 29 is what the tag holds, not what the theme contains.

The archive's search box is the way past that. Searching a word rather than filtering a tag reaches names by meaning and description as well as by label, which for a theme this specific finds more than the tag does.

It's also worth knowing that the tag doesn't distinguish an object from an abstraction. Titan is a moon, Aurora is a light in the sky, Cosmo is the whole thing. If the distinction matters to you, each name's own page records what it points at.