How to name your cat

Cats really do learn their names

Research published in 2019 in Scientific Reports — Saito et al., Domestic cats (Felis catus) discriminate their names from other words — found that household cats can distinguish their own name from other, similar-sounding words — they habituate to a list of nonsense words and then respond again when their own name appears. They know. The visible response is just smaller than a dog's: an ear rotation, a tail flick, a head turn, and then a decision.

That changes what you're optimising for. A dog's name has to carry across a field. A cat's name has to be distinctive at conversational volume, because most of the time you'll be saying it from ten feet away in a quiet room.

The sounds that work

Cats hear well into the ultrasonic range — higher than dogs, far higher than us — which is why they respond so readily to high, bright, sibilant sounds. The names that get the best response tend to share a few features:

• Two syllables. Same sweet spot as dogs, for different reasons: it's long enough to be distinct from ambient speech, short enough to say in the tone people naturally use with cats.
• An ee sound, ideally at the end. This is the strongest single predictor of a name a cat reacts to. Miso, Suki, Bijou, Nori, Mochi. Note how many are natural diminutives already.
• Sibilants and soft consonants. S, SH, Z, CH and soft T sound close to the frequencies cats use with each other. It's no accident that pspsps works on cats worldwide and would get you nothing but a confused look from a labrador.
• Skip the hard command shapes. Cats aren't learning sit and heel, so the collision problem barely applies. You have much more freedom here than dog owners do.

Plan for name drift

This is the thing nobody warns you about: the name on the paperwork and the name you actually say are usually different within a month. Cats accumulate names. Persephone becomes Seph, then Sephy, then Boo, then a set of noises with no vowels in them at all.

This isn't a problem — cats cope fine with several names, since what they're really tracking is your tone and the context. But it does mean you should choose with the drift in mind:

• Pick a long name only if you like at least one of its short forms.
• If you want the long name to survive, choose one that's already hard to shorten — Juniper resists it better than Bartholomew.
• Whatever drifts, keep the collar tag and microchip registry on the formal name, and keep them consistent with each other.

Naming in a multi-cat house

The rule is simple and it's the one people break: make the names sound different from each other. Not thematically different — acoustically different. Different opening consonant, different vowel shape, ideally different syllable count.

You can absolutely keep a theme — two Japanese foods, two Norse gods, two desserts — as long as the sounds diverge. There's more on this in the guide to naming two at once.

Naming for the coat

Naming a cat for its markings is a long tradition and it holds up better than it does for dogs, because a cat's coat rarely changes much after the first few months. Two cautions. Colourpoint kittens — Siamese, Ragdoll, Birman and their relatives — are born pale and darken with age, so Snow may be a very dark cat by its first birthday. And most black kittens acquire a rust or bronze cast in strong sunlight, which is either a bonus or an irritation depending on how literal your name was.

The Colours & Looks theme in the catalogue is built for exactly this — Calico, Chestnut, Tassel, Puff — and the Food & Sweets theme quietly does the same job with better manners: Espresso for a dark cat, Palmier for a cream one, Mole for a brown one.

Teaching it, without a dog's toolkit

The mechanism is identical to a dog's; the currency is different. Cats work for food, and only sometimes for praise.

• Attach it to the good thing. Say the name once, clearly, immediately before the food bowl goes down, the treat appears, or the wand toy starts moving. Every single time, for a couple of weeks.
• Never attach it to the bad thing. Same rule as dogs, and cats are less forgiving about it. Don't call the cat by name to give medication, put it in a carrier, or trim its claws. Go and collect the cat instead. A name that occasionally means carrier stops working within about three uses.
• Don't repeat it. Saying it four times in a row teaches a cat that the name is background noise, which is a lesson cats are already strongly inclined to learn.
• Accept the response you get. An ear swivelling towards you is a response. Requiring the cat to walk over is a different training project.

Ready to look? The name quiz filters to cats, then to a personality — independent, gentle, dramatic — then to a sound shape. Two clicks and you're looking at a much smaller, much better list.