Andrew the weimaraner/yellow lab is curled up with Gracie the cat on a floor cushion, while Frankie the Labrador retriever paces the kitchen and Eliza the heeler snoozes in her crate.
What seemed like a clever naming trick — giving human names to pets — turns out not to be so innovative. A Washington Post analysis of pet names suggests that when it comes to human names, some are as apt to be found in dogs as they now are in humans, despite their human origin. That’s true, for example, of Eliza.
But you’d have to stroll a lot of kennels to find some other names — Kevin, for instance — in the canine crew.
“And then there are the Jacks and Rileys and Angels of the world, who live in the magical place where people and dogs overlap,” The Washington Post reported.
Cinder, the border collie, might feel left out — unless you consider Cinderella a truly human name.
Wrote Alyssa Fowers and Chris Alcantara of The Washington Post, “Our friends at the Atlantic recently noticed the trend of dogs named after humans, and we wondered: How common are dogs with human names? To find out, we explored the names of 61,000 dogs available for adoption on the website Petfinder, and compared them with baby names in Social Security Administration records stretching back to 1880.”
Then they looked at dog license records in the Seattle area to see if the naming trend was only true at shelters — where human kennel operators routinely assign names when they don’t know a dog’s name — or it the trend holds true for homed dogs, too.
It does. People like to give their fur kids human names. But not just any human names. The analysis said the names that make it on the dog tag are most apt to be new faves (Bella or Riley or Luna) or very old names like Charlie and Daisy and Ruby that graced the Social Security Administration’s rolls back in the 1880s and shortly after.
As The Atlantic explained — and the article didn’t just look at dogs — “In the U.S., and much of the rest of the Western world, we’re officially living in an era of bequeathing unto our pets some rather human names.”
Boise State University anthropologist Shelly Volsche told The Atlantic it’s a sign that pets are “members of the family,” credited with having traits like “agency and personhood.”
The article said that “animals in our homes commonly receive so many of the acts of love people shower on the tiny humans under their care: Pets share our beds, our diets, our clothes. So why not our names, too?”
It’s a somewhat newish trend. Kathleen Walker-Meikle, a medieval historian at the Science Museum Group and the author of “Medieval Pets,” told The Atlantic that names given pets in the Middle Ages were typically more descriptive: Her examples were Sturdy or Whitefoot, for instance.
Sometimes, she said, people have used names that were part of pop culture or referred to a historical figure. A modern take would be Biden or Trump or Swifty.
The Washington Post article includes a feature that lets you look at your name — or your dog’s name — to see which type of animal really owns it these days. My Eliza has a nearly 50/50 name. “In a stadium of 100,000 people and 100,000 dogs, 15 dogs and 17 people would be named Eliza,” it says.
Frankie’s a dog name: in that same packed stadium, 113 dogs and 21 people would bear the moniker. The odds flip for Andrew: 15 dogs and 363 people.
And Cinder? Not many dogs. But zero people — absolutely not one — bear the name.
As for the names that will likely hold sway at a dog park near you soon? The Social Security Administration’s top names for 2021 (2022 is not final yet) are:
- Liam and Olivia.
- Noah and Emma.
- Oliver and Charlotte.
- Elijah and Amelia.
- James and Ava.
- William and Sophia.
- Benjamin and Isabella.
- Lucas and Mia.
- Henry and Evelyn.
- Theodore and Harper.
Check out the full dog name analysis on WashingtonPost.com.