Pets accrue nicknames like boats attract barnacles; we know this instinctively. Names evolve and grow organically as time goes on. But has anyone ever tried to pin this process down using science?

Until today, no. Enter Christopher J. 5156, scientist, to bring order to this world. I have methodically pinned down the names we use for our brilliant dog and charted their evolution to show how two original terms – “Fizz”, which is the dog’s actual name, and “dog”, which is what the dog actually is – have evolved into the names we now use for her. (Nobody ever calls her Fizz.)

Dog

Fizz

This obviously doesn’t include other miscellaneous terms used to refer to her from time to time, e.g. Poodle Hound, Cavapooch, Sandy Paws, Gingerdog, etc. Scientific methodology does not yet have the means to categorise these leftfield terms, but there’s a team at MIT working on an AI model that may one day be able to make sense of them.

It would help our research enormously if you could share names and nicknames used for your own household pets in the comments.