The Most Popular Pet Names From The Past Century
You have to think very carefully when coming up with a name for your beloved pet. This is the name you’ll be saying all day, every day for the foreseeable future — and it’s one of the few words your furry friend will actually learn. So how do you possibly make such a momentous decision? Well, you could take inspiration from what others have done before you and lean into the most popular pet names from the past 115 years. Luckily for you, we know exactly what those names are.
Hartsdale Pet Cemetery research
The following list is based on an extensive study of the names of animals laid to rest at Hartsdale Pet Cemetery in New York. This resting place is home to more than 80,000 pets and is the oldest continually operating establishment of its kind in the country. The research itself was conducted by website FirstVet, which looked at 25,000 digitized names to draw its conclusions. And the results make for fascinating reading.
Highest regnal number: Virgo XIII
The first wildcard finding that the company found was related to regnal numbers. That is the number you put at the end of an animal’s name when that pet is one in a long line of furry friends who shared the same name. So the animal with the highest regnal number in Hartsdale was Virgo XIII, who was laid to rest in 1986. The runner-up was Silvia IV from 2001.
Honorable mention: Baby
One cat name that cropped up again and again in the 1990s through to today is Baby. FirstVet put this down to the release of Dirty Dancing in 1987 and its iconic “nobody puts Baby in the corner” moment. Yet Baby never quite made it to the top of the rankings in any particular decade. Those honors instead went to some unexpected blasts from the past.
1930s dog names: Queenie
People gave their pets regal names throughout the 20th century — but Queenie is only the top dog name in the 1930s. This seems somewhat strange for a nation that fought for independence from the British, where the monarchy has such a strong presence. And it’s even stranger when the head of state across the pond at the time was King George V.
