Where every name comes from, and how we count them.
Dog names come from 328,004 dogs in the New York City Dog Licensing Dataset (licences issued 2014–2025) and 34,376 dogs in the City of Seattle pet licence data. Cat names come from 16,426 cats in the Seattle data. We removed placeholders like "Unknown", tidied capital letters and counted each animal once, even if its licence was renewed several times.
Breed pages use the NYC data, where breeds are recorded. "Times more likely" compares how often a name is used for that breed with how often it is used for all dogs whose breed is known.
First names come from the US Social Security Administration's national baby-name records, 1880–2024: every name given to at least five babies of the same sex in a year, 372,009,000 births in total. We group them by decade and rank them by sex. The "1 in X" figure divides the decade's recorded births of that sex by the number of babies given the name.
Last names come from the 2020 US Census surname list. Because the Census removes spaces from multi-part surnames (De Los Reyes is stored as DELOSREYES), we leave those few names out rather than show them incorrectly.
We wrote a set of sound rules for every race and place: opening sounds, linking syllables, endings and surname patterns. The generator joins the parts and smooths the joins (no triple letters or clashing vowels). Viking names are the exception: they use real Old Norse first names and the traditional father-name system.
Every name is generated in your browser. Your shortlist is saved only on your device. Nothing you choose is sent to us.