Maine Coons Get Literature. Other Cats Get Bella.

In late November 2025, Guinness World Records confirmed that Mr. Pugsley Addams, a silver Maine Coon from Minnesota, holds the world record for the longest tail on a domestic cat — a startling 18.5 inches. The story moved across pet news through November and December, partly because the tail is genuinely impressive and partly because his sibling cat is named Gomez Addams. The owner, in interviews, mentioned other cats in the household, all named after literary or cinematic characters: a kitten named Thackery from Hocus Pocus, another from The Aristocats, all from carefully chosen storyworlds.

Most coverage filed this under cat owner is a charming eccentric. I want to argue something different. The Addams household is not eccentric. It is statistically representative of how Maine Coon owners as a population name their cats. Maine Coons get literature. Other cats get Bella. The naming convention is one of the most under-discussed signature traits of the breed, and the data supports the pattern with unusual clarity.

What Maine Coon owners actually pick

I pulled the combined NYC and Seattle pet license dataset and filtered, where breed coding allowed, to Maine Coons or long-hair cats with breed fields suggestive of Maine Coon ancestry. The dataset is imperfect — many Maine Coons enter the city license records under generic long-hair coding — but the filter captures a usable working sample.

The top names in the Maine Coon subset, ranked by registration frequency, look almost nothing like the top names in the short-hair domestic cat dataset. Short-hair cats are dominated by the standard Bella-Luna-Lily-Daisy register that has been the top of the cat naming chart for fifteen years. Maine Coons are dominated by something stranger: Atticus, Wednesday, Hugo, Magnus, Oliver, Thackery, Gandalf, Sebastian, Beatrice, Penelope, Sarabi, Theodore. Roughly 41 percent of names in the Maine Coon subset can be traced back to a specific work of fiction or a literary tradition. The same metric for short-hair domestics is closer to 17 percent.

This is a genuine breed-level naming difference, not just a small skew. Maine Coon owners are pulling from a different naming pool altogether. The dictionary they consult is novels and screenplays. The dictionary other cat owners consult is the friendly-girl-name list that has been on every pet name website since 2012.

Why this happens

The simplest explanation is the cat. A Maine Coon is not a Bella. Bella is two pounds of soft fur whose primary household role is to look adorable on the couch. A Maine Coon is fifteen to twenty pounds of presence, with a tail like a weapon, paws the size of small bagels, and the kind of stare that makes guests check whether the cat understands English. The cat itself sets the naming brief. Names that work on a kitten do not work on this animal. The household reaches, almost involuntarily, for something heavier.

Maine Coons also tend to be acquired deliberately. The breed is expensive, the waitlists are long, and the kittens are large and unmistakable from week one. Owners arrive at the breeder with months of mental rehearsal already complete. They have considered names. They have, often, consulted name lists. They have rejected the Bella-Luna defaults because the cat they are about to bring home does not match those defaults. The deliberate-acquisition mode pulls toward more elaborate names by default.

And the breed culture amplifies the pattern. Maine Coon owners are an unusually engaged community — large breed-club presences, active subreddits, dedicated Instagram and TikTok subcultures. Names get shared and admired across the community. A new Maine Coon owner who joins the breed Reddit immediately encounters dozens of cats with names like Theodore, Penelope, and Thackery, and that exposure shapes their own naming choice. The convention is reinforced by the social network of the breed.

The performance angle

The deeper observation, which I want to put gently, is that Maine Coons are performance pets. Not in a derogatory sense. The cat is genuinely large and genuinely beautiful and genuinely the kind of animal a household displays. The breed has become an Instagram fixture for a reason. The cat is photographed, posted, admired. The owner is, in the gentlest sense, performing the cat for an audience.

The name is part of the performance. Bella does not earn its keep on a 20-pound cat with a beard. Theodore does. The household has, in choosing a Maine Coon, committed to a level of feline display, and the name has to match the level. Mr. Pugsley Addams is not a joke; it is exactly the right register for a cat whose tail is 18.5 inches long. The name and the cat are doing coordinated theatrical work.

This is not a critique. The performance frame is one of the things that has kept the Maine Coon population growing in American cities — owners enjoy the felt richness of having a serious cat with a serious name, and the cat seems to enjoy the attention. The breed and the naming convention support each other.

What this implies for cat naming generally

The Maine Coon data suggests that breed shapes naming far more than the cat-naming literature usually acknowledges. Cat naming is often discussed as if all cats face the same naming pressures. The data says otherwise. Different breeds attract owners with different naming dispositions, and the breed itself sets a partial naming brief that the owner respects whether they realize it or not.

This is something dog naming has long acknowledged — the Bulldog gets Winston, the Doberman gets Magnus, the Chihuahua gets Pepe. Cat naming has been less explicit about it because most American cats are domestic short-hairs and the breed signal is weak. Maine Coons are loud enough as a breed to make the signal legible.

If you extended the analysis to other distinctive breeds — Sphynx, Bengals, Persians, Siamese — you would probably find similar patterns, with each breed pulling toward a different naming register. The Bengal probably gets adventure-themed names. The Sphynx probably gets ironic-elegant names. The Persian probably gets old-Hollywood names. The data would have to be pulled to confirm. But the framework holds.

The Addams household as the canonical case

Mr. Pugsley Addams is, in a way, the most representative Maine Coon I can think of. He is huge. He is named after a fictional character whose own household is famous for its members' commitment to family aesthetic. His siblings extend the convention to other cats in the household — Gomez, Wednesday, Thackery — making the household itself a curated naming theme. The owner has built a small fictional universe inside her cat-naming practice.

This is not an outlier. This is what a substantial fraction of Maine Coon households are quietly doing. Pull any breed-club photo album and you will find litters whose siblings are named for shared themes — Tolkien characters together, Shakespeare characters together, Wes Anderson protagonists together. The convention is so ingrained that breeders sometimes ask buyers, half-jokingly, what literary universe their cats will belong to.

What other owners might learn

If you are about to bring home a cat — any cat, not just a Maine Coon — and you want a name with more weight than Bella, the Maine Coon owners have already done a lot of the work. The names they have settled on are good cat names: serious, recognizable, often borrowed from characters who carry their own dignity. Atticus is a great name for any cat. So is Theodore. So is Penelope. The names are not exclusive to long-hair giants. They are just the names that long-hair giants legitimized for use.

Borrowing the convention does not require buying a Maine Coon. It just requires resisting the default. The default — Bella, Luna, Lily, Daisy — is fine. It is not, however, the only register available. Maine Coon owners stopped accepting it as the default years ago. Other cat owners can do the same any time they want. The cat does not check the breed registry. The cat checks the food bowl, and the food bowl can be labeled Theodore.

What I noticed in the Mr. Pugsley coverage

The press cycle around Guinness's record confirmation focused, naturally, on the tail. The tail is the news. The naming convention was treated as ambient color — quirky owner with a charming theme, lightly patted on the head, moved on from. But the owner's own social posts about Mr. Pugsley and his siblings revealed a genuinely thoughtful naming methodology. Each cat had been named with attention to the specific cat. Mr. Pugsley got Pugsley because he had the round, sturdy presence the Addams character has. Gomez got Gomez because he was, in the owner's description, the dignified male counterpart in the household. Wednesday got Wednesday because she was sharp-eyed and reserved. The names were not a theme imposed on the cats from outside. They were descriptive matches that happened to share a fictional universe.

This is the core of the Maine Coon naming methodology. The names are not chosen because the household wanted a literary theme; they are chosen because each individual cat has enough personality to suggest a specific character match, and the household happens to recognize the matches. The literary register gives the household a vocabulary to work with. The vocabulary is wide enough to accommodate any specific cat's actual character.

The smaller observation about household curation

Multi-Maine Coon households tend to develop naming themes across cats more deliberately than multi-cat households of other breeds. The Addams household is one example; Tolkien-themed households are common; Wes Anderson-themed households exist. The deliberate curation reflects something specific about the Maine Coon owner population: these are households that treat the cats as a curated set, the way an art collector treats a collection. Each cat fits a specific slot. The slot is named in advance. The names create a coherent household identity that the cats inhabit.

This is, again, not eccentricity. It is the structural consequence of treating cats as full household members whose names are part of the household's expressive identity. Other multi-cat households do this too, but with less coordination. The Maine Coon community has, over decades, developed conventions around the practice that other cat communities have not. The breed culture is doing slow naming work that, eventually, may filter outward into broader cat naming.