What pet license data tells us about how people actually name cats

Three cities publish every cat name they license. Here's what the data shows about how cat naming has changed — and what's stayed surprisingly stable.

#data #naming

Most “top cat names” lists you’ll find online are written by pet insurance companies surveying their own customers, or by veterinary chains tabulating their bookings. They’re useful, but they’re filtered — by who can afford insurance, by who lives near a particular vet group, and by whoever the company decided to ask.

A different kind of data exists, and it’s better. A handful of cities publish their pet license records as open data: every dog and cat licensed in the city, with the name, breed, and license year attached. The records aren’t a sample — they’re the whole population of registered pets in a city, over years or decades. For naming questions, that’s about as close to ground truth as you can get outside of a national census.

Three cities currently publish detailed enough data to be useful for this kind of analysis: Seattle, Toronto, and Vancouver. This is what their data has taught us.

The Luna decade

The single most striking pattern across all three cities is the rise of Luna. Ten years ago, Luna wasn’t in the top 25 cat names in any of these cities. Today it’s number one in all three — by a significant margin in Seattle and Toronto, and tied for the top spot in Vancouver.

Luna’s ascent isn’t unique to North America. Veterinary registries in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand show the same pattern, with similar timing. There’s no single cause, but the contributing factors are clear: the name is two syllables, ends in a soft vowel, has an obvious meaning (the moon), and works for cats of any color or gender. It’s also short enough to say a hundred times a day without effort, which is the trait that quietly determines whether a cat name survives a decade.

The closest analog in the human-name registries is the rise of Olivia, which followed almost the same curve about five years earlier.

Food names never go away

The second pattern is more durable: food names are the most stable category in cat naming. The exact mix shifts — Pumpkin and Biscuit have been steady for thirty years; Mochi only became common in the last ten — but the share of cats named after food stays roughly constant across all three cities, hovering between 6% and 9% of newly licensed cats every year going back as far as the records do.

The top food cat names in the combined data:

  1. Pumpkin
  2. Biscuit
  3. Mochi
  4. Pepper
  5. Oreo
  6. Olive
  7. Cookie
  8. Bean
  9. Peanut
  10. Mango

A few patterns stand out. Pumpkin is overwhelmingly used for orange cats. Oreo is almost exclusively for cats with high-contrast black-and-white markings — to the point that you can predict the coat from the name with ~90% accuracy. Olive skews female; Bean is gender-neutral. And Mochi, the newest entrant on this list, has been the fastest-growing food name in every year of data we have.

”People names” are not what people think they are

If you ask someone whether their cat has a “people name,” they’ll usually tell you yes or no with confidence. But the data shows that the boundary between “human names” and “cat names” is much fuzzier than the conventional wisdom suggests.

Some names are almost exclusively cats in these registries: Whiskers, Mittens, Tigger, Tabby. Some are almost exclusively humans: Robert, Jennifer, Christopher. But the middle ground is enormous. Bella, Luna, Oliver, Charlie, Lucy, Max, and Milo are top-ten names for both cats and human babies in the same cities, often in the same years.

This matters for naming because it suggests the answer to “is X a weird name for a cat?” is almost always no — if you can imagine a person being called X, plenty of people are calling their cats X too.

The mythology long tail

Mythological names — particularly Egyptian and Greek — are surprisingly common in the long tail. They never crack the top 25 in any city, but combined they account for somewhere between 2% and 4% of all licensed cats. Cleo alone is consistently top-50. Bastet, Osiris, Anubis, Athena, Apollo, Loki, and Freya all show up reliably.

Loki has had a noticeable surge in the last five years that almost certainly traces back to the Marvel character — the curve fits the release dates of the films and TV show.

For more on these themes, we’ve collected the curated lists in /themes.

What’s missing from the data

A few honest caveats about what this data can and can’t tell us:

  1. Outdoor cats and rescues are underrepresented. Pet licensing is voluntary in most cities, and compliance rates for cats are much lower than for dogs. Cities with mandatory licensing (like Vancouver) get a more complete picture than cities with voluntary registration (most US cities, including Seattle).
  2. The data lags reality by 6–18 months. A name has to become popular, then a cat has to get one, then the cat has to be licensed, before it shows up. So a name trending today won’t appear in the data for a while yet.
  3. The data is English-speaking and Anglo. All three cities are predominantly English-speaking. Naming patterns in Japan, Korea, Latin America, and continental Europe diverge in ways we’d love to study but can’t from this sample.

The full picture

We pull live data from these three city registries on every build, so the rankings on this site reflect the most recent data we have. You can see:

If you work for a city that publishes pet license data and we haven’t included you yet, we’d love to add it — the comparative analysis gets richer with every new city. The methodology and ingestion scripts are open on GitHub.

← All articles