On a Zoom call last week I realised that every dog-owning north American I know addresses their dog as ‘buddy’. At least, they do if it’s a male dog: they probably wouldn’t use ‘buddy’ (a form of ‘brother’) as a familiar appellation for a female dog. But anyone might say ‘buddy’ to an unfamiliar dog: the way we talk to/about animals in general is strongly influenced by the default male principle. And dogs, at least in Anglo-American culture, are imagined as prototypically male (whereas cats are prototypically female). As one Internet Sage explains,
Dogs are considered masculine because they smell bad, shit great quantities on everything, and are forever poking their noses into crotches. Cats are considered feminine because no matter what you do on their behalf, it is never good enough.
This is one example of the way human gender-stereotypes get projected onto our closest non-human companions. And the same tendency is apparent in the names we give to dogs.
‘Buddy’, it turns out, is not just a common appellation for male dogs, but in many cases their actual name. According to a list I consulted, which was compiled using data sourced from several English-speaking countries, Buddy ranks fourth among the current top ten male dog-names—behind Bailey, Charlie and Max, but above Cooper, Jack, Toby, Bear, Scout and Teddy. The corresponding list of popular female dog-names has Bella, Molly, Coco, Luna, Lucy, Poppy, Daisy, Ruby, Lily and Becks.
These lists might remind us of the now-commonplace observation that companion animals in affluent societies are regarded as part of the family, with a status not unlike that of human children. Almost all the dog-names I’ve just listed could as easily be given to a child, and many have featured on recent lists of the top 100 baby-names. In the UK in 2020, for instance, Lily was the fourth most popular girl’s name; Poppy came in at 17; Bella, Molly, Luna, Lucy, Daisy and Ruby were all in the top 100. Charlie and Jack were among the top ten boys’ names, while the top 100 also included Max, Teddy and Toby.
Since historical dog-name records are hard to come by, it’s difficult to say if this convergence between child and dog names is a recent phenomenon, but in my own recollection there used to be less overlap. When I was a child, the dogs owned by families in my street were called Prince (a black Labrador), Lad (a German Shepherd), Snowy (a white poodle) and Wag (a corgi). And yes, I know people can be called Prince and Lad (though I’ve yet to hear of a person called Wag), but those were not recognisable people-names in 1960s Yorkshire.
That’s not to say dogs never had people-names. The sheepdogs on the TV show One Man and His Dog [sic] often had names like Bess, Jess or Tess; my favourite fictional dog was called Toby. But only some people-names were acceptable dog-names, and their status as dog-names could raise questions about their use for people. My mother had strong opinions on this topic. Whenever I complained about my own name, Debbie, she would remind me that if I’d been a boy, my father had wanted to call me Bruce, a name she regarded as only suitable for dogs. Today that distinction has evidently disappeared. All kinds of people-names can now be dog-names, and they’re seen as the unmarked choice: websites tell new puppy-owners they can make their pet stand out by not giving it a human name.
But while there’s significant overlap between currently popular dog-names and baby-names, the two sets are not identical. The three most popular names for baby girls in 2020—Sophia, Olivia and Amelia—do not appear anywhere in the dog top 100. That could be because they’re too long: I’m told that for the purpose of calling a dog you want a name no longer than two syllables (in the current top 100 lists only four names have more than two). There are also cultural constraints. My brother-in-law, who was raised Catholic, was told as a child that you couldn’t give a dog a saint’s name. And it’s no surprise that Muhammad, one of the commonest baby names in Britain, does not feature on the list of popular dog-names.
Interestingly, however—and despite the dearth of dogs named Sophia/Olivia/Amelia—the list of popular female dog-names is closer than the male one to the corresponding list of popular baby-names. To explain why that’s interesting, I need to revisit some points from an earlier post about gendered patterns of human personal naming in English-speaking societies over the past 100+ years.
Research in this area has consistently found that parents are more conservative when naming boys. Girls’ names (rather like their clothes) are both more varied and more influenced by fashion, so that the rankings change more rapidly over time. One historically important reason for this—the tradition of naming boys after their fathers or other close relatives—is perhaps less relevant today; but there’s still a widespread view that ‘fancy’ names, meaning anything unusual, complicated, trendy or ‘decorative’, are more appropriate for daughters than for sons.
Another consistent finding is that English-speaking parents prefer names that clearly indicate their child’s sex, especially if the child is male. Some trendwatchers are now predicting a surge in the popularity of ‘androgynous’, ‘unisex’ or ‘gender-neutral’ names, but historically these have never comprised more than about 2% of the names in circulation, and over time they almost invariably morph into girls’ names (historical examples include Beverley, Dana, Evelyn and Shirley). What’s behind this is a form of status anxiety, reflecting the fact that gender in patriarchal societies is a hierarchical system. For girls, androgynous names are seen as status-enhancing, but for boys the opposite is true. So, as a name becomes more common among girls, it will start to be avoided by parents naming boys, until eventually it ceases to be androgynous.
What’s interesting about the dog-names is that they don’t replicate these patterns: rather they reverse them. There’s more variation among names for male dogs, and more of the male names are androgynous.
These two patterns are related, in that the lack of ambiguity in the female list reflects, in part, the lack of variety. A large majority of the top 100 female dog-names—82 of them—are conventional (human) girls’ names like Molly, Lucy and Lily. The 18 items that don’t fall into that category include eight less conventional people-names which are either female (Dakota, Piper, Harper, Meadow, Willow, Summer) or androgynous (River, Storm), and five female endearment/respect terms used as names (Honey, Sugar, Lady, Missy and Princess). The remaining five items are Bramble, Pepper, Sage, Snickers and Ziggy—names you’d be unlikely to give a child, but could probably give a male dog. On this list, then, androgynous names are marginal, both few in number and low in rank (the highest-ranked androgynous name, Bramble, only just makes it into the top 50).
What about the male dog-names? Once again, a clear majority of the top 100 are conventional (human) boys’ names, but they’re a smaller proportion overall (66 items rather than 80+), which means that other kinds of names make up a third of the list. Within that third, the largest subgroup, containing about a dozen items, consists of androgynous people-names (I classified them as androgynous if a combination of personal experience and online searching identified at least one male and one female person with the name in question). Androgynous names are not only more numerous on the male list, they’re also higher-ranked. One of them, Bailey, is right at the top, and several others are in the top 20.
The remaining items on the male list are non-people names, and with three exceptions (Blue, Oreo and Shadow) they can be sorted into four groups. One of these is comparable to the Honey/Lady/Missy/Princess group on the female list: it contains the title Duke and a series of nicknames—Ace, Buddy, Buster, Sparky—which I’d intuitively classify as male, though Ace and Sparky might be somewhat ambiguous. The other three groups, however, are different from anything on the female list.
One group contains names of gods and other mythological figures: Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian legend, Loki and Thor from Norse mythology, the Greek deity Zeus, and—oddly, since she’s a goddess—the Roman Juno. A second subcategory is ‘large wild animals’, in which we find Bear, Koda (the name of a Disney character who’s a bear), Moose, and Simba (the name of the Lion King). Finally there’s a looser group which I’ve labelled ‘Manly Things’, because the names in it allude to stereotypically male roles, activities and objects (such as weapons and powerful motor vehicles): they are Bandit, Diesel, Gunner, Harley, Hunter, Ranger, Remington, and Tank.
Whether or not we find them appealing, the male dog-names are a more inventive collection than their female counterparts—which is surprising, especially if you subscribe to the ‘dogs are the new children’ theory, because for children the pattern is that boys’ names are more conservative. We might expect dog-names in general to be less conservative than baby-names, because dog-namers have a degree of freedom that (responsible) baby-namers don’t: a dog isn’t going to be embarrassed by its name, or bullied by other dogs because of it. But that doesn’t explain why it’s specifically male dogs who get the more unusual names. I can’t claim to have a watertight explanation, but I do think there’s more to say about the difference.
Giving any ‘personal’ name to a dog means treating it as a quasi-human person (dogs themselves don’t use naming to mark individual identity). In theory we could do this without also projecting the human attribute of gender onto dogs, but in practice the names we choose for them suggest we do see masculinity or femininity as an important part of the identities we construct for them. The vast majority of popular dog-names are unambiguously gendered in the same way as most (English) people-names; even the androgynous names only appear on either the male or the female list, not both. I don’t think this way of naming dogs is just a natural consequence of the fact that dogs have a sex. They also have a sex in cultures where they aren’t companion animals, but in those cultures they may have names that are more like labels, chosen simply to distinguish one from another, which reference more visible features like size or colour (e.g. ‘Big Dog’ and ‘Small Dog’, which a friend tells me are common dog-names in Vanuatu).
Do the kinds of gendered dog-names we favour suggest that we imagine male and female dogs differently? The answer seems to be ‘yes and no’. Both lists are dominated by the same type of name, one that could also be given to a male or female child, and that suggests that the gendered connotations of human names are also projected onto dogs. For instance, flower-names like Lily and Daisy are popular choices for girls, but more or less unthinkable for boys, because the qualities they connote (e.g. beauty, delicacy and freshness) are considered feminine/unmasculine. The same rule is applied when naming dogs, though among dogs the sexes are less different in appearance, and neither sex is famous for delicacy and freshness.
Another gendered pattern involves diminutive names, which (in English) typically end in -ie or -y; they connote ‘small, cute, unthreatening, immature’, and they are given more frequently to girls. This pattern does not seem to transfer to dogs. Though there are more -ie/y names in the female top 100 (42 to the males’ 33), many of them, like Daisy and Poppy, aren’t true diminutives (i.e., affectionate forms of another name, like Betty for Elizabeth or Benjy for Benjamin). If we count only the ‘true’ ones, the numbers are almost equal–17 for female dogs and 16 for male ones.
Maybe this supports the idea that dogs’ status within families is similar to that of young children. It’s common for little kids of both sexes to be called by a diminutive form of their name, but as they get older, boys more often shift to using their full name, or a less childish short form. Benjy is more likely to become Benjamin or Ben than Betty is to become Elizabeth. With dogs there is no such difference: both sexes can be given diminutive names on the assumption they will never outgrow them.
But we shouldn’t forget that about a third of the top 100 male dog-names are not just conventional boys’ names. The male list is more varied than the female one, and the names on it, especially the more unusual ones, suggest that dog-masculinity can be imagined in a wide range of different ways. At one end of the spectrum we have androgynous names like Bailey and Riley: I imagine dogs with these names as dignified and faithful companions, possibly large, but not aggressive or obtrusively masculine. At the other extreme are names like Thor, Simba, Gunner and Tank, which imply power, dominance, strength and aggression. In between are names like Buster and Sparky, suggesting a more boyish, playful or mischievous masculinity.
By contrast, dog-femininity seems to be imagined more narrowly, as either motherly or girlish. Many popular female dog-names (Bella, Molly, Abby et al.) suggest qualities like warmth, kindness and dependability; some (Luna, Willow, Meadow) are a bit fey; few suggest mischief (just Snickers and Ziggy, though Becks might be a bit of a tomboy), and none imply aggression or nastiness. I can’t help wondering if this is related to our culture’s more expansive view of what roles, behaviours or personality traits are acceptable or attractive in boys and men compared with girls and women.
By now you may think it’s me who’s projecting. If so I take your point: merely perusing lists of popular dog-names tells you nothing about what motivated people’s choices. Context, as always, matters: what we think it means to name a dog Thor will obviously be different depending on whether the dog is a German Shepherd or a Yorkshire terrier (and whether its human has some personal connection to the name, like being the descendant of Vikings or an expert on Norse mythology). Without contextualisation, any patterns we see in lists of popular dog-names will only be interpretable in very general terms, and the rest–like the last two paragraphs–will be speculation. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that there’s apparently so much consensus on how female dogs should be named, whereas our views on naming male dogs seem far more polarised. Still, there is a way around that. If in doubt, just call them ‘Buddy’.
Thanks to Meryl, Miriam and Tim for their insights, and a shout-out to all the Buddies.
language: a feminist guide 