Cat Naming Reports
Long-form analytical pieces drawn from the live iCatNames dataset of 22,292 active cat names, 691 templates, and 632 famous cats. Each report states its data and source limits.
State of Cat Naming 2026
A flagship cross-section of how 22,426 cat names actually break down — by origin, gender, popularity, cultural archetype, and the specific way cat naming differs from baby naming and dog naming.
22,426 · active cat names analysed across 485 templates and 378 famous cats
iCatNames maintains an active dataset of 22,426 cat names across 485 templates (60 breeds, 21 colors, 45 origins, 359 themed categories), 378 famous cats with 360 long-form encyclopedia entries, and 134,656 cross-refe...
· 2,155 words
Cat Name Trends 2024-2026: What Six Datasets Actually Show
Luna and Milo still rule, but the real movement is underneath them: food jokes, vintage-human revivals, and pop-culture picks rising fast.
+92% · the one-year jump for Tater, the fastest-rising male cat name of 2025 (Rover)
Adopt a kitten in 2024-2026 and the data says you probably named it Luna or Milo, the two names that top Rover, Pumpkin, Healthy Paws, and Trupanion alike. But the real movement is underneath the leaders. This report...
· 1,433 words
What 5 Industry Reports Say About Cat Naming, 2024-2025
Side-by-side review of Rover (13th annual, 5 countries, used with permission), Pumpkin, Healthy Paws, Trupanion, and Wikipedia's top-cat-name reports — where they agree, where they diverge, and what each methodology can tell you.
5 · industry data sources cross-tabulated — Rover, Pumpkin, Healthy Paws, Trupanion, Wikipedia
Cat naming has no government dataset comparable to the SSA baby-name records. The closest substitute is the annual top-name reports published by US pet-services companies — Rover, Pumpkin, Healthy Paws, Trupanion — ea...
· 2,200 words
Cat Name Length & Phonetics: What 22,426 Database Rows Show
A reproducible spelling audit, followed by a careful check of what feline-cognition and hearing studies do—and do not—say about names.
22,292 · case-insensitive spellings across 22,426 database rows
Short names, two syllables, and an “ee” ending are often presented as a scientific formula for getting a cat’s attention. Our own earlier version of this report repeated too much of that formula. This corrected analys...
· 2,063 words
Religious & Mythological Cat Names Across Cultures
Five traditions, the deities and concepts behind them, and the names from each one that survive in modern cat naming.
36 + 30 + 55 + 81 + 304 · tradition-tagged names in the dataset (Egyptian, Norse, Hindu/Sanskrit, Japanese, Greek)
Domestic cats were first systematically venerated in Egypt around the second millennium BCE, where the goddess Bastet was depicted as a lioness, then later as a household cat. From there cat-adjacent and cat-named fig...
· 1,439 words
Pop Culture × Cat Naming
A century-and-a-half of famous cats, sliced by era, medium, and franchise — what 360 encyclopedia entries reveal about how cat naming actually moves with culture.
360 · famous-cat encyclopedia entries spanning 1747 to 2020
iCatNames now hosts 360 long-form encyclopedia entries on famous cats spanning roughly 1747 to 2020. This report reads that dataset as a cultural archive — the era when famous cats were predominantly literary (pre-195...
· 1,289 words
Names That Crossed: From House Cats to Big Cats
A specific subset of cat naming — names that work for both the eight-pound tabby on your sofa and the four-hundred-pound lion in a zoo enclosure — and what their cross-species migration says about how cat names are made.
56 · cross-species names appearing in both house-cat and big-cat naming traditions
The iCatNames database of 22,426 domestic cat names overlaps in 56 entries with the canonical big-cat (lion, tiger, leopard, panther) naming tradition. Some are deity names that pre-date the domestication of the cat (...
· 1,287 words
Cat Acoustic-Recall Science: A Long-Form Guide
A research-grounded explainer for the Sound-Recall Score tool — what five peer-reviewed papers actually establish about cat hearing and name recognition, vs. what popular advice claims.
5 · peer-reviewed papers underlying the Sound-Recall Score
The iCatNames Sound-Recall Score tool (/sound-recall) gives any cat name an instant 0-100 score against four heuristics: short length, high-front-vowel ending, repeated syllables, and a sharp consonant onset. The tool...
· 2,068 words
Methodology
Every report is grounded in the current iCatNames database (22,292 active cat names, 691 templates, and 632 famous cats). Where outside research is cited, the source is named in the report. See our methodology for the full disclosure.