There are human names and there are dog names. For example, Spot, Fido and Fluffy—those are all dognames. But Robert, Michael, and Peter…human names. Right?
Well, not entirely. It turns out that the many people actually name their dogs popular baby names. And the Washington Post wanted to dive in deeper. They decided to find out what the most common people names for dogs are.
The news outlet recently posted an article after studying the names of 61,000 dogs available on the popular adoption website Petfinder. They compared all of those names to baby names in Social Security Administration records dating all the way back to 1880 and determined which ones overlapped the most.
The result? Interestingly enough, about 1 in 7 Petfinder dogs had names that also are commonly given to babies. Here are some of the most popular people names for dogs:
Females
- Grace
- Rose
- Taylor
- Olivia
- Emma
- Zoe
- Joy
- Bonnie
Males
- Walter
- Peter
- Jerry
- Bruce
- Chase
- Rex
- Jackson
Other observations include:
- The popularity of certain names varied tremendously based on the name (There was a Kevin for every 1 in 2,000 dogs, but it’s a popular human name—however Bonnie, Jackson and Hunter had a heck of an overlap between the two. Why?!)
- There were more female dog names that overlapped human names (20 percent of female dogs compared with about 10 percent of male dogs)
- The names that overlapped were either old-fashioned (Daisy, Charlie, popular in the 1880s) or modern (Bella, Max, Luna, popular after 2010)—there wasn’t much in-between
- Nicknames were more common for dogs. So, for example, “Jack” ranked high on the list. That’s also probably why there were a lot more “Bobby”’s than “Robert”’s and so on.
- Very few dogs had top human names such as James, Michael and Mary (only 3 of the 61,000 dogs was named Robert!)
To learn more about this cool experiment, plus all the names they found that overlap humans and dogs, and why certain dogs have certain human names, check out the Washington Post article.
Do you have a dog with a human name, or is it more of a pet name? Did your dog’s name make the list?