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What each tag means
Every name in the catalogue is described the same way, which is what makes the filters work. Here's what each field is actually recording.
| Tag | What it records |
|---|---|
| Origin | The specific source of this particular name: a language (Swahili, Old Norse), a tradition (Greek mythology), a domain (Astronomy, Gemstone) or a work (an anime character, a film). It's the narrowest, most literal tag, and there are 331 of them. |
| Meaning | The literal sense of the word or the identity of the figure, in a few words. “Bringer of destruction”, “small stone”, “goddess of the dawn”. |
| Culture | A broad grouping used for filtering — the family the origin belongs to, so you can ask for anything Celtic or anything Japanese without picking through 331 origins. |
| Theme | The mood or subject area: Mythology & Legend, Food & Sweets, Space & Science, Wordplay & Humor. Nineteen of them, and it's the tag most people browse by. |
| Pets | Which animals the name suits — dogs, cats, birds, fish, small animals, reptiles, amphibians, farm animals. Many names suit all of them. |
| Gender | Male, female or unisex, based on conventional use of the name rather than any rule about the animal. |
| Syllables | Counted for the standard English pronunciation. Used for the length filter, which matters more than most people expect. |
| Sound | The overall acoustic character — soft, sharp, and so on. Useful when you know how a name should feel before you know what it should be. |
| Vibe | The personality it suits: playful, gentle, regal, independent, and the like. |
How much to trust a one-line meaning
Treat every meaning here as a starting point, not a citation. A few honest caveats about the whole genre of name meanings, this catalogue included:
- Etymologies are often contested. Plenty of common names have two or three competing derivations, and reference works disagree. A single line can only give the most widely accepted one.
- Transliteration flattens things. Names from Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Yoruba, Hindi and dozens of other languages lose tone, vowel length and script distinctions when written in the Latin alphabet. Two names that look identical here may be different words in the original.
- Mythological figures are compressed. “Goddess of war” is a summary of a figure who may have had a dozen roles across centuries and regions.
- Modern coinages have no etymology at all. Some names are invented — by novelists, by game studios, by parents in the 1990s — and the “meaning” is whatever the inventor intended, if anything.
If a meaning is doing real work in your decision — if you're choosing the name because of what it means — spend five minutes checking it against a second source. And if you find something we've got wrong, tell us; corrections get made.
Checking a name before you commit
Four checks, in order of how often they save someone:
- Search the name plus “meaning” and the language. You're looking for a second source that agrees, and for anything the catalogue's one-liner left out.
- Check it in the languages spoken around you. A word that is charming in one language is occasionally vulgar in the one your neighbours speak. This is a two-minute check that has saved a great many people from a lifetime of a certain kind of look at the dog park.
- Listen to it pronounced. Written forms mislead. If you plan to say a name the “wrong” way, that's your right — but know that you're doing it, because someone will eventually tell you.
- Search the name plus your intended breed. Occasionally turns up an association you'd rather avoid: a notorious racehorse, a disgraced public figure, a brand.
Borrowing from a culture that isn't yours
The catalogue draws on a wide range of living traditions on purpose, because the alternative — a name list drawn only from English and Greek myth — is a much poorer thing. Using a name from a culture that isn't yours is generally fine and always has been; humans have swapped names across borders for as long as there have been borders. A few points of care, though:
- Sacred and religious names deserve a second thought. Names of deities in living, actively practised religions, and names carrying specific religious weight, land differently on a dog than a name from a tradition nobody has practised for fifteen hundred years. Norse gods are genuinely uncontroversial. Others are not.
- Titles and honorifics aren't names. Some words in the wider naming world are ranks, roles or terms of respect rather than personal names, and using one as a pet name reads as a mistake to anyone who speaks the language.
- Say it properly. The single most respectful thing you can do with a borrowed name is learn to pronounce it the way its speakers do.
- Know what you're referencing. If a name comes from a specific figure — historical, religious or fictional — read a paragraph about them first. That's the whole of the due diligence.
Using meaning as a tiebreaker
Here's the practical truth: meaning almost never decides a name on its own, and it's superb at deciding between two names you already like equally.
Sound comes first, because sound is what the animal responds to and what you live with. Once you're down to a shortlist of names that all pass the shout test, the collision check and the vet desk test, meaning is a fine way to break the tie — and it gives you something to say when people ask, which they will, for the next fifteen years.
Shortlist a few on the name quiz using the heart, then read the meanings side by side. One of them will be obviously right.