Chewy

Two names wearing one spelling

There is no traditional name Chewy. It is an English adjective doing service as a name, and it reaches a dog by one of two routes: as a description, for a puppy that chews everything within reach, or as a shortening of Chewbacca.

The second route is the common one, and the films spell the nickname Chewie. The spelling with a y is the one that has settled for dogs, partly because it is easier to shout and partly because -y is the default ending for pet names in English: Charlie, Sadie, Rusty, Lucky.

The Wookiee whose name may mean dog

Chewbacca is the Wookiee co-pilot in Star Wars, and his name has a more interesting etymology than most fictional names get. The usual account, and the one Wikipedia carries, derives it from the Russian sobaka — собака — which means, plainly, dog. A competing explanation points at the Czech žvýkat, "to chew".

There is a further loop worth knowing. George Lucas had an Alaskan Malamute called Indiana, the dog he described as his co-pilot, and that dog is generally credited with shaping Chewbacca's size and loyalty; the Denver Art Museum has written about the connection. So the most famous Chewy in fiction is downstream of a real dog, which is a reasonable thing to know before naming yours after him.

One detail worth stealing: the same malamute is the namesake of Indiana Jones. If you like the story, Indiana is sitting there as a dog name too.

A pet shop owns the search term

Worth knowing before you build a plan around this name: Chewy is also the largest online pet retailer in the United States. It was founded in 2011 and bought by PetSmart in 2017 for $3.35 billion, which at the time was the biggest e-commerce acquisition ever made.

That does not change anything about using the name, but it does mean a dog called Chewy will be asked about it. It also means the word is already warm to dog owners, in the way that a brand everyone uses becomes warm. There are worse things for a dog name to be than the word printed on the food delivery box.

The problem with naming a dog after a verb

The practical objection to Chewy is not its shape. It is two syllables, it ends on a long -ee, and it is trivially easy to call. The problem is that it is a word your dog will hear in other contexts, quite often in a corrective tone: "don't chew that", "leave it", "stop chewing". A name and a reprimand that share their vowel are a genuine hazard for a recall cue.

If you want the name anyway, make the dog's version different from the everyday word. Draw the vowel out — Choooey — or keep Chewbacca for recall and Chewy for affection. Whichever you choose, use it identically every time. A cue that sometimes means "come here" and sometimes means "stop that" is not a cue.

See also: Chewbacca · Chewie · Grogu · Cocoa · Toffee

Common questions