Stuck Naming Your Puppy? 310+ Dog Names on One Wheel

Two syllables ending in a vowel or a hard consonant work best — Bella, Cooper, Rocky. Dogs respond to the sound pattern rather than the word, so a distinct rhythm matters more than length. Avoid anything that sounds like a command you use: "Bo" is hard to distinguish from "no", and "Kit" from "sit".

The adult. Puppies are all small and comic for about five months and then are not, and a name chosen for a wriggling handful can sit oddly on a forty-kilo animal for the next twelve years. If in doubt, say it out loud in the voice you would use to call the dog back across a park.

That is most of what it gets used for. Everyone submits two names, all of them go on the wheel, and one spin decides. It works because nobody can claim the result was steered — which is the actual sticking point in most naming arguments.

Clear the wheel and paste your own names into the Bulk Edit tab, one per line. You can also weight the entries if some names have more support than others — an entry with double the weight gets double the slice and double the odds.