Horse name generator

The rules, if the horse will ever race

A stable name can be anything. A racing name cannot, and the restrictions are stricter than most people expect. Weatherbys, which runs the register for British racing, sets them out plainly.

“Names can have a maximum of 18 characters including spaces and punctuation.” That's the rule that kills most good ideas, and it's why so many racehorse names read like telegrams.

Three more restrictions catch people out. A name “must not include the name of a real person or someone who has been dead for less than 50 years unless their written permission or the permission of their family is provided”. Names “must not have any obvious commercial significance”, so the sponsor idea is out. And a name “must not include suggestive, vulgar or obscene words”, with meanings that aren't in poor taste and not offensive to any religious, ethnic or political group.

Some names are protected outright: the winners of the major races and notable retired horses. Those never come back into circulation. None of this applies to a horse that will never run under Rules, which is most horses.

Stable name or show name

British yards mostly run two names at once and it confuses newcomers. The show name is the long one on the schedule and the passport. The stable name is what everybody says, and it's usually shorter, softer and often edible: the Nutmegs, Biscuits and Pickles of the world.

It matters here for a practical reason: the stable name is the one that belongs on something you hang up. It's what the horse answers to and what the family says at dinner. The show name goes on the paperwork.

Naming a Welsh or an Irish horse

Native vocabulary follows the breed. Seren is star and Eira is snow, which is why both keep turning up on Welsh ponies, and Fionn and Aoife sit the same way on a Connemara. If the horse itself is still undecided, choosing your horse weighs the breeds against each other first.

Naming for the coat

The oldest naming habit in Britain is to describe the horse. A Yorkshire diarist wrote in 1647 that he “rid on Scueball to Carlecoates”, a skewbald horse called, essentially, Skewbald. If you're working from the coat, the words are worth getting right: see piebald or skewbald, dun or buckskin, and what makes a horse coloured.