Unisex Brown Cat Names

Most brown cats are tabby cats, and most tabby cats are descended directly from the Felis silvestris lybica wildcat that humans first started living alongside in the Fertile Crescent roughly 9,000 years ago. The mackerel tabby pattern — narrow vertical stripes on a warm brown ground — is the wild-type coat. If you've adopted a brown housecat with no pedigree paperwork, you've likely brought home the closest living version of the original domestic cat.

"Brown" is the folk word; cat fanciers split it. The Havana Brown carries solid chocolate as a breed standard (English origin, 1950s — the name comes from cigar or rabbit, depending which registry you ask). The Burmese sable, foundation color of the breed since Wong Mau in 1930, is the same chocolate-brown tone. Bengals are spotted on a brown ground, descended from Asian leopard cat crosses. Most browns walking around your neighborhood, though, are honest brown tabbies with no breed paperwork.

Brown housecats sit closer to ordinary life than show cats do. Tama, the calico-brown stationmaster of Kishi Station in Wakayama, Japan, is the clearest modern example — appointed in 2007, credited by the Wakayama Electric Railway with saving the line from collapse, with a tourism impact estimated above 1.1 billion yen.

What does your brown cat actually want to be called — something cozy from the kitchen, or something quieter from the woods?