I was quite surprised by the relative popularity of my previous analysis of the data for Licensed Cats & Dogs in Toronto for 2011, given how simple it was to put together.

I was browsing the Open Data Portal recently and noticed that there was a new data set for pets: the top 25 names for both dogs and cats. I thought this could lend itself to some quick, easy visualization and be a neat little addition to the previous post.

First we simply visualize the raw counts of the Top 25 names against each other. Interestingly, the top 2 names for both dogs and cats are apparently the same: Charlie and Max.

Next let’s take a look at the distribution of these top 25 names for each type of pet by how long they are, which just involves calculating the name length and then pooling the counts: You can see that, proportionally the top dog names are a bit shorter (distribution is positively / right-skewed) compared to the cat names (slightly negatively / left skewed). Also note both are centered around names of length 5, and the one cat name of length 8 (Princess). Looking at the dog names, do you notice something interesting about them? A particular feature present in nearly all? I did. Nearly every one of the top 25 dog names ends in a vowel. We can see this by visualizing the proportion of the counts for each type of pet by whether the name ends in a vowel or consonant: Which to me, seems to indicate that more dogs tend to have “cutesy” names, usually ending in ‘y’, than cats. Fun stuff, but one thing really bothers me… no “Fido” or “Boots”? I guess some once popular names have gone to the dogs. References & Resources

Licensed Dog and Cat Names (Toronto Open Data)