Hungarian pet names: what Buksi and Cirmos really mean

Want to know how a language really works? Look at how people name their pets. Hungarian dog and cat names are full of diminutives, suffixes and imagery — and they reveal exactly the same grammatical patterns you meet everywhere else in Hungarian.

In this article we look at the official figures, at the classics every Hungarian knows, and above all at what those names teach you about the language itself.

What do the numbers say?

Hungary has a surprisingly good source for this kind of information. Every microchipped dog is registered, name included, and the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (the KSH) publishes the data. In 2024 there were 878,500 registered dogs.

The first thing that stands out: the top three is entirely international. You will hear Luna, Molly and Bella just as often in Britain or Germany. Only at positions four and five do the Hungarian names appear — and those are the interesting ones: Csoki and Maci.

You see the same split in the dog breeds. Most registered dogs are mixed breeds (281,500), followed by the dachshund, the German shepherd and the Yorkshire terrier. The Hungarian breeds come after that: the puli (23,700) and the vizsla (20,200) lead the way, with the mudi, the kuvasz and the komondor behind them.

The classics and what they mean

This is where it gets linguistically interesting. Traditional Hungarian pet names are almost never just names — they are ordinary words with a suffix attached.

Two suffixes that keep coming back

Put those names side by side and two patterns emerge that you need just as badly in the rest of Hungarian.

1. The diminutive ending -i

Morzsi, Csoki, Maci, Szotyi, Blöki, Buksi — every one of them an ordinary word with -i stuck on the end. That suffix turns a neutral word into something small and affectionate.

You met exactly the same ending in our article on street language: bocsánat becomes bocsi, köszönöm becomes köszi. So it is not some separate "pet name trick" but a living pattern that teenagers, parents and animal lovers all use.

2. The suffix -s / -os / -ás

This suffix means roughly "provided with" and turns a noun into an adjective.

Once you recognise this pattern you can apply it anywhere — which is exactly why a pet name like Foltos is secretly a grammar lesson. Do watch the vowel harmony: which variant you get (-os, -es, -ös or -ás) depends on the vowels in the base word.

And the cats?

There is no chip registration for cats the way there is for dogs, so hard national figures are missing. What we do know comes from European research among more than forty thousand cat owners: among females Luna, Nala, Lilly and Mia lead the list, while among males it is Simba, Leo and Felix.

So again, mostly international names. The genuinely Hungarian cat names are the traditional ones: Cirmos for a tabby, Cirmi as a shortened pet form, and Kormos for a black one. With cats you rarely hear the command-like quality that dog names often have — cica (kitty) is the default form of address for many Hungarians, whether the animal has a name or not.

Practise it yourself

A nice way to fix these two suffixes in your memory: work out what you would call your own pet in Hungarian. Is it small? Stick -i onto a word. Does it have spots, a thick coat or a striking colour? Then -s is your friend. That way you produce correct Hungarian almost automatically — and that is exactly how the language is built.