Need a good name for a gentle male golden retriever? Call it Cooper. How about a family-friendly female German shepherd? Go with Coco.
These are a couple of the top 10 dog names based on breed and gender, according to FidoAlert, an Amber Alert system for pets that surveyed more than one million dog owners and ranked the names.
The list is fast becoming a handy naming tool for new dog owners, said Taylor Jenkins, FidoAlert’s general manager.
“If you’ve got a Luna, Bella or Daisy, you’ll find a whole lot of them out there,” he said. “People often find the joy in that and also say, ‘should my next one be a little bit more unique?'”
Jenkins and his team compiled the list after he mused about how many other dogs had the same name as his, a female German Shepard named Chica.
Their data yielded all types of categories, including most popular names based on coat colors, breeds and sizes.
“There’s so many different ways to explore this data and have fun with it,” Jenkins told WTOP. “People just want more of it.”
The top female dog names in the U.S. are:
- Luna
- Bella
- Coco
- Lucy
- Sadie
- Daisy
- Bailey
- Stella
- Molly
- Lola
The top male dogs are:
- Bear
- Max
- Duke
- Shadow
- Cooper
- Oreo
- Buddy
- Moose
- Blue
- Charlie
Jenkins believes a dog’s name says a lot about its owner. For instance, most of the uncommon dog names involve food.
“We project our perceptions of stereotypes of a breed and there’s a lot of fun names in there,” he said. “There are a lot of Snickers, a lot of Cookies. We certainly are a hungry nation and it’s surprising that it makes its way into how we name our pets.”
The data even unveiled that there may be a connection to how some pet owners name their children and pups.
“What we saw is that a lot of human female names end in vowels or have that ‘ie’ sound at the end,” said Jenkins. “When it comes to female dog names it’s a little more exaggerated. We take these human conventions of naming and exaggerate them further for dogs.”