This seems to be something cat owners indulge in. I had a tabby named Allegro Rondo Finale. What are yours?
And a P.S. for non-cat-fans:
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My grandparents had a calico cat named “Cynthia Leroy Dog”. I was quite young when they got her, and I have no idea who came up with the name.
P.S. It wasn’t until our neighbors got a calico that I looked it up and discovered that virtually all calico cats are females; the color variation depends on a genetic effect that can normally only happen with two X chromosomes.
As I understand it, the few male calicos are XXY.
RIP Louisa May Allcatt
Sorry, my cat is mononymic.
@ Powers (4) – Nothing wrong with that. I’ve never been very good at naming pets (and was therefore somewhat worried when it came time to name kids). The kids’ names came out fine, and the cat we now own was inherited (or “recycled”) from our neighbors, so it came with a serviceable, if unimaginative name (“Luna”) already applied. I can live with that.
Clark K. Fluffins, Esq.
Our cat is named Fives, but his veterinarian decided to slightly embellish his name in their records. There they call him by his “full” name, “Mister Fives (lastname)”. It’s always weird for me to hear that.
We had a cat we called Teep, from one of the sounds he made, but his official name, at least according to my younger brother (then about nine or ten) was Willoughby Wiggins Teape.
The Wiggins Teape bit came from a paper maker, founded in 1761, which my brother had seen on a van. Not sure about Willoughby… I think he just summoned it from nowhere.
I had a friend who named his dog, Deoge, pronounced De-OH-Gee. I asked him how he came up with the name. He looked at me and said, “D…O…G…”
@Billytheskink, the vet offices I’ve dealt with in recent years all do have a practice of listing a surname for pets, from their humans’ surname. While I like the idea of including pets as “members of the family”, I don’t think of it as working that way with names[*]. So I will call and identify myself and then add “I’m calling about my cat Mo” .
Oh, but I haven’t before this seen that Mister part!
[*]Y’know, it complicates that moment when you need to explain they are adopted.
@Narmitaj, first my brother (living here in Chicago at the time) had a cat he called Netsch, partly for the sounds it made and also to name after Walter Netsch, architect and city-planner (and at that time better known than his wife Dawn Clark Netsch, who became a prominent politician, and ran for Governor of Illinois). Later, I got a cat who was making distinctive talky sounds, and in reflection on her sound and my brother’s pattern, I called her Geach, also after a person, philosopher Peter Geach. Neither of them had an extended name form.
Andrew J. Kittycat (Andy)
Maxwell Housecat (Max)
After those, we let the kids name them: Moppet (after Beatrix Potter), FatCat Fritz and Oscar (an odd couple), Venus (was supposed to be named Mars, until I reminded my daughter that the cat was female).
Before Christmas there were a lot of ads for DNA tests for pets, including ones from Ancestry.com. Definitely a first-world product.
I can sort of see this for dogs, since different breeds have different characteristics and different long term health issues. And what breeds might have been the ancestry of a mutt is a common source of speculation among dog owners. But cats? Is there much to find out? I await enlightenment from any cat owners here who have purchased DNA testing.
40 years ago, I had an orange tabby who we named Pope Linus IV, but it just didn’t stick. He wound up as Lord Garfield.
Ok weird story.
My oldest child is deaf, the rest of the family is hearing. When we got a cat, it came up in conversation that deaf familys don’t generally “name” their pets; The pet may have a sign, but that won’t necessarily translate. So we named the cat Neko, which we understood to be Japanese for cat, as the child responsible for the cat loved anime. We also had a cat named Gato, for similar reasons.
So we had two cats, named Cat. Just in different languages. I don’t even know if we spelled them or pronounced them correctly, we just knew the cat’s name was cat.
@Trish Lee: Why name a cat, it won’t come when you call it anyway — but maybe it will respond to its sign!
I haven’t named my own cats since the first two. They either came to me with names or some of the kids in the neighborhood named them for me.
Mine tend to have monosyllabic names. Not that it matters, it’s not like they come when I call. Unless I have food.
MacArthur and Cassiopeia but called Mac and Cassie, RIP both
Friends of ours had a cat named Cat Cat Johnson. I have no idea how that came about. Maybe it was inspired by Cow Cow Davenport, the boogie-woogie pianist.
If you show your cats at cat shows, your cat probably has a name that includes the cattery where it came from, like Wind In The Willows’ Hold ‘Em Or Fold ‘Em. Is Ludwig a show-quality cat?
My cat’s name at the shelter was “Cookie” – which I wasn’t particularly fond of – so we renamed her “Jinkies”, ostensibly as a short form of “Li’l Miss Jinx”, but actually after the interjection frequently used by Velma Dinkley
I’ve seen enough videos on YouTube to note that cats often do know their names, as well as those of their housemates.
Though I’ve been catless for a few years now, there was always one or two around growing up. Names were simple and not terribly original. We had a Shadow, a Tigger, a Pumpkin, a Smokey, a Blackie (came to us named Satin) etc. over the decades. The more creatively named Traveler came as a stray to us from Illinois to home in the Boston area.
Starting with my first cat in 1964:
Benjamin David Goodman (Benny)
Thatch and her spawn: Winston, Benson, Hedges, Ella Fitzgerald (Fitz), Pearl Bailey (Pearl), Sophia Loren (Sophie)
Sophie’s: Tigger, Cap’n Chicken Gutz (after which, we scrounged enough money to get them all fixed.)
My future wife’s cats: Zappa and Lady Day
Foxy and Dusty (dumped in our yard at the edge of town)
Muhammad Alley Cat and Gray Cat (strays that adopted us)
and finally, Jasmine and Bagheera adopted from the shelter with names already attached.
Alas, all have long since crossed over the rainbow bridge.
Sophie was a gorgeous long hair with faint Siamese tips, Zappa had a black “goatee”, and Pearl, Fitz and Lady Day were solid black.
Of course, there’s the TS Eliot poem that explains that cats in fact have three names – the everyday one, the fancy one, and the one no one knows but the cat itself.
We’ve nearly always had a proper name and one or several everyday names for our cats – Lady Thai called Lady, ThaiGirl called Thai (or Tie – pronounced the same), etc. The cat I had previous to this one had a proper name, Puss in Boots with Mittens (named for her markings), and went by Boots which was also her name from the shelter. My current cat I’ve never figured out his full name, he’s just Troy (also his shelter name).
Not one I had (I had no cats of my own although we had some when I was a little kid) but the model for Tommy of Breaking Cat News had the full name Admiral Thomas “Tommy” Whiskerstache.
Alas, that incarnation has died, but Georgia has stated that all cats in BCN will live forever in spite of their real-life counterparts.
PS: When I loaded LarK’s site, all the “Le Comte des Chats” links made Firefox inquire as to whether I wanted the page translated.
I fostered a momma and her litter of kittens during the pandemic shutdown. One of the perks was that I got to name them. All had 1 or 2 syllables (except Sam I Am). My daughter adopted Puff and immediately renamed her Pufflicious Puckingham III. That lasted a week and Puff couldn’t care less either way.
My family probably had a half-dozen cats over the years, but I only remember two of their names: first “Ottilia” (who got it because my mom and dad both discovered that we had a pair of great aunts with that name on either side of the family), and her descendant “Ernie” (named by my sister after the Sesame Street muppet). Ernie later went feral, lived off the land and out of sight for at least a year, came back to visit us and got fed for about a week, and then was never seen again.
P.S. @ Lola (25) – The old saying is “mind your Ps and Qs”, but with a name like that it should be “mind your Ps and Fs”. :-)
I once had two cats from the same litter. The black one, who purred a lot, I named Pulsar. The gray (“blue”) one was Quasar, because she was a quasi-stellar object (at least in her own mind) with delusions of grandeur. Curiously, the two sisters never got along with each other.
Way way back in the early 1970’s, I had an underground comic book, I think by Kim Deitch, and there was an ad in the back because the artist had some kittens to give away. If I remember correctly, the mother’s name was Mama Katz and the five kittens were Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Shlimey, and Mo.
A hefty boi at the shelter had been dubbed “Waylon,” but I wanted “Waffles,” and my daughter wanted “Williams,” so he became Waylon D. “Waffles” Williams III, Esq. I’m sure that would have nonplussed Bill for a good five seconds
In nearly 40 years together, my other half and I have shared our lives with more cats than we can count. I can’t think of any with names quite as regal as Ludwig’s, but we did have Aethelred the Unready some years ago. There were also the presidential cats, Herbert Hoover (the crumb vacuum) and Richard Nixon (he of the jowls), and tenor-voiced Fritz Wunderlich.
Currently we have sisters Eleanor of Aquitaine and Joan of Arc; and Julien de Brioude. Julien is named for the patron saint of the parish church a block from where we found him.
But most of our cats have, and have had, simpler names: big talkers Forte and Fortissimo; Lucille (they picked a fine to leave her); black-nosed Smudge; Katy Louise; Molly Marie.
And Harriet. Harriet was the first of a precious few cats who have told me their names.
People look at me strangely when I say that. And it’s rare. But sometimes when I sit quietly with a cat for long enough, the name lands lightly, unbidden, atop my head.
Harriet was an especially interesting case. One morning rush-hour I rescued her from an expressway exit ramp just as she was about to clamber up into the left front wheel well of an Oldsmobile.
I traversed that ramp on my way to work for well over a year afterward. One day I was driving the OTHER direction on the street that the ramp let out onto, in a neighborhood I’d never visited before. About a block away from the ramp where I found Harriet, I spotted the sign for a cross street: Harriet Street.
Was Harriet her “Deep and inscrutable singular Name,” as T S Eliot put it in The Naming of Cats? Could it have been the nearest human-comprehensible equivalent? That’s a secret she never revealed.
Always been terrified of animals (even as an adult), so of course next sister after me loved them. Guess which one won this – yes, my sister would bring home dogs she found.
Understand, while being afraid of them I did not want them harmed and when my parents left us home when they went on a trip when we were old enough I would make sure that the dog(s) were fed. She also had hamsters (same problem for me) and she did not feed them I would stand a distance away and throw their food at their cage to make sure they were fed – easier to do same with her fish – and yes, afraid of them also.
Husband therefore cannot understand the huge collection of bears in our house – many waiting to go home to the basement for the year since Christmas ended.
Comics I Don't Understand 
My grandparents had a calico cat named “Cynthia Leroy Dog”. I was quite young when they got her, and I have no idea who came up with the name.
P.S. It wasn’t until our neighbors got a calico that I looked it up and discovered that virtually all calico cats are females; the color variation depends on a genetic effect that can normally only happen with two X chromosomes.
As I understand it, the few male calicos are XXY.
RIP Louisa May Allcatt
Sorry, my cat is mononymic.
@ Powers (4) – Nothing wrong with that. I’ve never been very good at naming pets (and was therefore somewhat worried when it came time to name kids). The kids’ names came out fine, and the cat we now own was inherited (or “recycled”) from our neighbors, so it came with a serviceable, if unimaginative name (“Luna”) already applied. I can live with that.
Clark K. Fluffins, Esq.
Our cat is named Fives, but his veterinarian decided to slightly embellish his name in their records. There they call him by his “full” name, “Mister Fives (lastname)”. It’s always weird for me to hear that.
We had a cat we called Teep, from one of the sounds he made, but his official name, at least according to my younger brother (then about nine or ten) was Willoughby Wiggins Teape.
The Wiggins Teape bit came from a paper maker, founded in 1761, which my brother had seen on a van. Not sure about Willoughby… I think he just summoned it from nowhere.
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/ap17209/wiggins-teape-co-ltd
I had a friend who named his dog, Deoge, pronounced De-OH-Gee. I asked him how he came up with the name. He looked at me and said, “D…O…G…”
@Billytheskink, the vet offices I’ve dealt with in recent years all do have a practice of listing a surname for pets, from their humans’ surname. While I like the idea of including pets as “members of the family”, I don’t think of it as working that way with names[*]. So I will call and identify myself and then add “I’m calling about my cat Mo” .
Oh, but I haven’t before this seen that Mister part!
[*]Y’know, it complicates that moment when you need to explain they are adopted.
@Narmitaj, first my brother (living here in Chicago at the time) had a cat he called Netsch, partly for the sounds it made and also to name after Walter Netsch, architect and city-planner (and at that time better known than his wife Dawn Clark Netsch, who became a prominent politician, and ran for Governor of Illinois). Later, I got a cat who was making distinctive talky sounds, and in reflection on her sound and my brother’s pattern, I called her Geach, also after a person, philosopher Peter Geach. Neither of them had an extended name form.
Andrew J. Kittycat (Andy)
Maxwell Housecat (Max)
After those, we let the kids name them: Moppet (after Beatrix Potter), FatCat Fritz and Oscar (an odd couple), Venus (was supposed to be named Mars, until I reminded my daughter that the cat was female).
Before Christmas there were a lot of ads for DNA tests for pets, including ones from Ancestry.com. Definitely a first-world product.
I can sort of see this for dogs, since different breeds have different characteristics and different long term health issues. And what breeds might have been the ancestry of a mutt is a common source of speculation among dog owners. But cats? Is there much to find out? I await enlightenment from any cat owners here who have purchased DNA testing.
40 years ago, I had an orange tabby who we named Pope Linus IV, but it just didn’t stick. He wound up as Lord Garfield.
Ok weird story.
My oldest child is deaf, the rest of the family is hearing. When we got a cat, it came up in conversation that deaf familys don’t generally “name” their pets; The pet may have a sign, but that won’t necessarily translate. So we named the cat Neko, which we understood to be Japanese for cat, as the child responsible for the cat loved anime. We also had a cat named Gato, for similar reasons.
So we had two cats, named Cat. Just in different languages. I don’t even know if we spelled them or pronounced them correctly, we just knew the cat’s name was cat.
@Trish Lee: Why name a cat, it won’t come when you call it anyway — but maybe it will respond to its sign!
I haven’t named my own cats since the first two. They either came to me with names or some of the kids in the neighborhood named them for me.
Mine tend to have monosyllabic names. Not that it matters, it’s not like they come when I call. Unless I have food.
MacArthur and Cassiopeia but called Mac and Cassie, RIP both
Friends of ours had a cat named Cat Cat Johnson. I have no idea how that came about. Maybe it was inspired by Cow Cow Davenport, the boogie-woogie pianist.
If you show your cats at cat shows, your cat probably has a name that includes the cattery where it came from, like Wind In The Willows’ Hold ‘Em Or Fold ‘Em. Is Ludwig a show-quality cat?
My cat’s name at the shelter was “Cookie” – which I wasn’t particularly fond of – so we renamed her “Jinkies”, ostensibly as a short form of “Li’l Miss Jinx”, but actually after the interjection frequently used by Velma Dinkley
I’ve seen enough videos on YouTube to note that cats often do know their names, as well as those of their housemates.
Though I’ve been catless for a few years now, there was always one or two around growing up. Names were simple and not terribly original. We had a Shadow, a Tigger, a Pumpkin, a Smokey, a Blackie (came to us named Satin) etc. over the decades. The more creatively named Traveler came as a stray to us from Illinois to home in the Boston area.
Starting with my first cat in 1964:
Benjamin David Goodman (Benny)
Thatch and her spawn: Winston, Benson, Hedges, Ella Fitzgerald (Fitz), Pearl Bailey (Pearl), Sophia Loren (Sophie)
Sophie’s: Tigger, Cap’n Chicken Gutz (after which, we scrounged enough money to get them all fixed.)
My future wife’s cats: Zappa and Lady Day
Foxy and Dusty (dumped in our yard at the edge of town)
Muhammad Alley Cat and Gray Cat (strays that adopted us)
and finally, Jasmine and Bagheera adopted from the shelter with names already attached.
Alas, all have long since crossed over the rainbow bridge.
Sophie was a gorgeous long hair with faint Siamese tips, Zappa had a black “goatee”, and Pearl, Fitz and Lady Day were solid black.
Of course, there’s the TS Eliot poem that explains that cats in fact have three names – the everyday one, the fancy one, and the one no one knows but the cat itself.
We’ve nearly always had a proper name and one or several everyday names for our cats – Lady Thai called Lady, ThaiGirl called Thai (or Tie – pronounced the same), etc. The cat I had previous to this one had a proper name, Puss in Boots with Mittens (named for her markings), and went by Boots which was also her name from the shelter. My current cat I’ve never figured out his full name, he’s just Troy (also his shelter name).
Not one I had (I had no cats of my own although we had some when I was a little kid) but the model for Tommy of Breaking Cat News had the full name Admiral Thomas “Tommy” Whiskerstache.
Alas, that incarnation has died, but Georgia has stated that all cats in BCN will live forever in spite of their real-life counterparts.
PS: When I loaded LarK’s site, all the “Le Comte des Chats” links made Firefox inquire as to whether I wanted the page translated.
I fostered a momma and her litter of kittens during the pandemic shutdown. One of the perks was that I got to name them. All had 1 or 2 syllables (except Sam I Am). My daughter adopted Puff and immediately renamed her Pufflicious Puckingham III. That lasted a week and Puff couldn’t care less either way.
My family probably had a half-dozen cats over the years, but I only remember two of their names: first “Ottilia” (who got it because my mom and dad both discovered that we had a pair of great aunts with that name on either side of the family), and her descendant “Ernie” (named by my sister after the Sesame Street muppet). Ernie later went feral, lived off the land and out of sight for at least a year, came back to visit us and got fed for about a week, and then was never seen again.
P.S. @ Lola (25) – The old saying is “mind your Ps and Qs”, but with a name like that it should be “mind your Ps and Fs”. :-)
I once had two cats from the same litter. The black one, who purred a lot, I named Pulsar. The gray (“blue”) one was Quasar, because she was a quasi-stellar object (at least in her own mind) with delusions of grandeur. Curiously, the two sisters never got along with each other.
Way way back in the early 1970’s, I had an underground comic book, I think by Kim Deitch, and there was an ad in the back because the artist had some kittens to give away. If I remember correctly, the mother’s name was Mama Katz and the five kittens were Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Shlimey, and Mo.
A hefty boi at the shelter had been dubbed “Waylon,” but I wanted “Waffles,” and my daughter wanted “Williams,” so he became Waylon D. “Waffles” Williams III, Esq. I’m sure that would have nonplussed Bill for a good five seconds
In nearly 40 years together, my other half and I have shared our lives with more cats than we can count. I can’t think of any with names quite as regal as Ludwig’s, but we did have Aethelred the Unready some years ago. There were also the presidential cats, Herbert Hoover (the crumb vacuum) and Richard Nixon (he of the jowls), and tenor-voiced Fritz Wunderlich.
Currently we have sisters Eleanor of Aquitaine and Joan of Arc; and Julien de Brioude. Julien is named for the patron saint of the parish church a block from where we found him.
But most of our cats have, and have had, simpler names: big talkers Forte and Fortissimo; Lucille (they picked a fine to leave her); black-nosed Smudge; Katy Louise; Molly Marie.
And Harriet. Harriet was the first of a precious few cats who have told me their names.
People look at me strangely when I say that. And it’s rare. But sometimes when I sit quietly with a cat for long enough, the name lands lightly, unbidden, atop my head.
Harriet was an especially interesting case. One morning rush-hour I rescued her from an expressway exit ramp just as she was about to clamber up into the left front wheel well of an Oldsmobile.
I traversed that ramp on my way to work for well over a year afterward. One day I was driving the OTHER direction on the street that the ramp let out onto, in a neighborhood I’d never visited before. About a block away from the ramp where I found Harriet, I spotted the sign for a cross street: Harriet Street.
Was Harriet her “Deep and inscrutable singular Name,” as T S Eliot put it in The Naming of Cats? Could it have been the nearest human-comprehensible equivalent? That’s a secret she never revealed.
Always been terrified of animals (even as an adult), so of course next sister after me loved them. Guess which one won this – yes, my sister would bring home dogs she found.
Understand, while being afraid of them I did not want them harmed and when my parents left us home when they went on a trip when we were old enough I would make sure that the dog(s) were fed. She also had hamsters (same problem for me) and she did not feed them I would stand a distance away and throw their food at their cage to make sure they were fed – easier to do same with her fish – and yes, afraid of them also.
Husband therefore cannot understand the huge collection of bears in our house – many waiting to go home to the basement for the year since Christmas ended.