Ginger Cat Names, Names For Ginger Kittens, Page 2

Between 1938 and 1972, the British illustrator Kathleen Hale produced nineteen picture books about Orlando the Marmalade Cat, his marmalade wife Grace, and their three kittens — Blanche the white one, Pansy the tortoiseshell, and Tinkle the black one. Marmalade and ginger meant the same thing in 1930s Britain: the warm, ground-spice colour of a tabby with the orange gene. The word arrived in English in the mid-fourteenth century via Old French and Latin from the Sanskrit shringavera, and a pound of ground ginger root in fourteenth-century England was reportedly worth a sheep. The colour name came later, by simple visual transfer.

A ginger cat in modern Britain still carries that older register. Owners reach for food-and-spice names — Marmalade, Biscuit, Crumpet, Custard, Toffee, Treacle, Hobnob, Jaffa — more readily than American owners do. The same X-linked inheritance pattern that produces orange and red cats elsewhere applies — most gingers are male, female gingers exist but require both X chromosomes to carry the orange allele, and a ginger queen is the breeder's slightly less common outcome.

Literary names also stay in heavy rotation: Orlando, Rupert, Macavity, Mungojerrie. So do British everyday names that suit a confident ginger tom — Henry, Dexter, Archie — or a ginger queen — Poppy, Daisy, Maisie, Tilly.

For the tortoiseshell sister to a ginger, see our Tortoiseshell Cat Names — Hale's Pansy was one.