Korean Pet Names · Free
A Korean name
for your pet
Give the day your pet was born — or the day it came to you — and this works out the two calendar characters for that date, then offers Korean names whose sound carries an element that day does not. The arithmetic is real. Reading an animal's chart is not a tradition anywhere: joining the two is our own idea, and it is for fun. Nothing is sent anywhere.
How these names are chosen
What the date does, and all it does
The date you type becomes the day's two characters — the stem and the branch the calendar gives that day. It is a rule with no room in it for interpretation: the same date always produces the same pair, and it is the same pair for every animal and every person born that day, anywhere. No birth time is asked for, no place, no timezone. Nothing about your pet enters the calculation, because nothing about your pet is in the form.
Each of the two characters carries one of the five elements, so two characters carry at most two — and sometimes only one. 20 January 2025 is 己丑, and both halves are Earth. That means there are always at least three elements the day does not carry, and sometimes four. One of them is picked by a fixed hash of the date string, and that is the element the names below supply. Which one gets picked is arbitrary. We write that down rather than dress it up as a reason.
Because the hash reads the date and nothing else, the answer holds still. The same date at the same size setting returns the same six names on every visit, on any device. A list that reshuffled on reload would be telling you plainly that nothing was being worked out.
How a Korean name carries an element — 발음오행
Every Hangul syllable opens with a consonant, and 발음오행 assigns each consonant an element by where in the mouth it is formed. ㄱ ㅋ ㄲ are made at the back of the tongue and count as Wood; ㄴ ㄷ ㄹ ㅌ ㄸ at the tongue, Fire; ㅇ ㅎ in the throat, Earth; ㅅ ㅈ ㅊ ㅆ ㅉ at the teeth, Metal; ㅁ ㅂ ㅍ ㅃ at the lips, Water. This is the half of Korean naming that needs no hanja at all, which is why it can be applied to a pet name that was never going to have any.
A name's element here is its first syllable's — the sound the name is called by across a park. 콩이 opens with ㅋ and counts as Wood; 달이 with ㄷ, Fire; 온이 with ㅇ, Earth; 솔이 with ㅅ, Metal; 별이 with ㅂ, Water. In 대나무 only the ㄷ is read; the 나 and the 무 are not counted.
Schools disagree on one point, and we say which side we took. ㅇ and ㅎ are Earth here — the 훈민정음 assignment — and this site follows 훈민정음 on every page that touches sound. A minority tradition reads ㅇ as Water instead, and under that reading 온이, 안개, 이슬 and 우람 would be offered to a different day than the one they are offered to here. That fork is not hidden. It is a choice, and it is ours.
Where the names come from, and how six of them get picked
The list is written out by hand: 58 entries, each an ordinary Korean word or an established pet name. 콩이 (bean) and 별이 (star) are among the most common dog names in Korea, and a list that avoided them in favour of unusual ones would be a list of names nobody uses. Nothing is assembled from characters that satisfy a rule, because a string that satisfies every rule is not thereby a name anyone would call out loud. The gloss beside each entry says what the word means. It does not say what the name will do.
Of the 58, eight carry Wood, fourteen Fire, eight Earth, ten Metal and eighteen Water — so whichever element a date lands on there are at least six names for it, and no date comes back empty. Size narrows the list rather than replacing it: 21 entries suit a smaller animal, 13 a larger one, and 24 either. Choosing "either" applies no filter at all.
Everything eligible is equally eligible, so the six shown are simply a window onto that list, starting at a position fixed by a hash of the date and the size together. Arbitrary, and left arbitrary — but not random. The whole calculation runs inside your browser: no model is called and nothing is sent anywhere, which on a free page is a rule we hold ourselves to rather than a feature.
There is no tradition behind this, and we will not invent one
Nobody reads a dog's chart. 사주 was built for a person, and this page is not doing it for an animal — the two characters above are the day's, not your pet's, and they attach to every creature and every person born that day alike. The arithmetic is real: the day pillar is calendar rule, and 발음오행 is a documented system whose school we have named above. The idea of laying the two over a pet is ours, and it is new. Working that looks serious is not a reason to borrow a lineage that does not exist.
So nothing here will make an animal lucky, healthy, calm or long-lived, and a name it is not given will not cost it any of those. We would have no way to check such a claim if we made it, and not being able to check it is the reason not to make it. If the birth date is unknown, the adoption date works perfectly well — which is the clearest measure of how small the claim is. A tool that was really reading the animal could not shrug at being handed a different date.
What it is good for is the ordinary difficulty of naming something. It hands you a short list of real Korean words, spelled in Hangul, romanised so you can say them, with the meaning written next to each — so you do not end up calling your dog something you would rather not have translated. The element narrows fifty-eight candidates to six. From those six, pick the one you like the sound of.
Separately from this: read the rules the chart engine calculates by →