Naming a cat comes with basically no rules. You can spend hours searching for the perfect name, or look at your new kitten and decide that they look like a Spoon. Both are completely acceptable choices.

Cats might have the widest range of names in the pet world. Some get human names like Lucy, George, or Fred. Others are walking around with names like Pickle, Soup, Toaster, and Beef. We've spent enough time looking at cats on the internet to barely question these anymore. Of course that orange cat is named Cheese. What else would his name be?

Food names are especially popular among cat people. Beans, Waffles, Muffin, Potato, Nugget, Meatball… the possibilities are endless. The name gets even better when the cat grows up to look nothing like the food they were named after. A tiny kitten named Meatball is cute. An enormous, fluffy adult cat still being introduced as Meatball years later is even better.

The official name is only part of it, anyway. Most cats collect nicknames faster than they collect fur on our clothes. A perfectly normal name can turn into complete nonsense within a few months. Oliver becomes Ollie, Ollie becomes Ollie Bollie, and eventually we're calling him Bologna from across the house without remembering exactly how we got there.

We've watched the same thing happen with pets in our own lives. A nickname gets used once as a joke, everyone keeps saying it, and suddenly the original name barely gets used anymore. The cat doesn't seem bothered by any of this. Half the time, they respond to the ridiculous nickname just as readily as the name they're actually registered under.

Then there are names that require an entire backstory. Maybe the cat did one weird thing as a kitten and has been named after it ever since. Maybe someone made a joke that stuck. Maybe the name makes absolutely no sense outside the household, and explaining it only raises more questions.

Cat people aren't exactly known for taking ourselves too seriously, and our pets' names are pretty good proof of that. These are animals we treat like members of the family while also calling them things we'd never dream of naming a human child.

So, we're celebrating the kitties whose humans skipped the traditional pet names and went with something much more entertaining. Long live all the Soups, Spoons, Potatoes, and Meatballs of the cat world.