NYC Dog Name Explorer

Every dog license New York City has issued since 2014 — 819,323 license records, distinct names. Search a name to see where it sits in the long tail, filter by ZIP code, and browse breed and name heatmaps. Counts are license records (dogs renewing across years appear more than once).

Your dog

The long tail of dog names

Every distinct name, ranked by number of licenses. Hover the curve to see which name holds each rank.

Names near this rank (table)

Top breeds for this name

Name-and-breed pairs with at least 20 licenses citywide.

Where this name clusters

ZIP codes with the most licenses for this name (pairs with at least 3).

Your neighborhood

Your ZIP code

Enter a ZIP code above to see its most popular names and breeds — and where your dog's name ranks locally.

The city’s dogs

Name × breed heatmap

The 20 most popular names against the 12 most licensed breeds. Depth of blue = license count (square-root scale). Hover any cell.

Borough × breed heatmap

Share of each borough's licenses held by its 12 most licensed breeds. Depth of blue = share of that borough. Hover any cell.

Rising & falling names

Climbing

Falling

The one-of-a-kind club

The most gendered popular names

Among the 300 most popular names: the strongest leans toward male or female dogs. Share of that name's licenses.

Most male

Most female

Dog birth years

Licenses by the dog's year of birth.

License extract years & sex

Records per dataset extract year; sex split across all records.

Ten fun facts

All from this dataset. Tap any dotted name to look it up above.

29.7%
of names are one-of-a-kind — 10,306 of the 34,663 names appear on exactly one license. Somewhere out there is the only BANSHEESDUNKEDINBLACKVELVET.
211 s
were born in 2020 — licenses for the name tripled the year Kobe Bryant died (nearby birth years run 46–129).
fell with the show
New KHALEESIs peaked with dogs born in 2017 (28), then collapsed to 3 by 2022 after the finale. 180 dogs carry the name for life.
69,642
licenses belong to dogs born in 2020 — the pandemic puppy boom, up 21% on 2019 and the biggest birth year in the data.
7.8%
is all the top-10 names cover, combined. Even at #1 is barely 1% of dogs. The long tail is nearly everything.
Royalty, loosely applied
3,225 · 2,298 · 1,610 · 1,569 · 205. Also: 32 male dogs named PRINCESS and 81 female dogs named ROCKY.
1,407 s
versus 16 QUEENS, 20 MANHATTAN and 149 BRONX — Brooklyn wins the borough naming war. Only 9 dogs are named , which feels low for this city.
Named after their own breed
302 dogs are named (4× concentrated in the Bronx), 303 (6× Staten Island) and 312 .
The snack tier
2,806 · 2,475 · 1,496 · 1,126 · 349 · 274 · 272 · 159.
The extremes
569 dogs are named just , four are named “2”, and the longest name runs 30 characters: ABBERANNUPTOTHEMOUNTAIN-MILLIE — on six licenses. 109 names are palindromes, led by (627).