Louie

A king's name with the corners sanded off

Louis is the most-used royal name in French history, borne by more kings of France than any other. Louie is the same name with the formality removed. The -ie ending is the standard English diminutive, and it does exactly what it does to Charles and Barbara: makes the name smaller, warmer and more familiar.

The meaning sits underneath both spellings. Louis is the French form of the Old Frankish Chlodwig, from Proto-Germanic hludaz, "famous" or "loud", and wigan, "to fight". "Famed warrior" is the usual gloss, though "loot bringer" also appears in reference works, which tells you something about what the Franks understood a warrior to be for.

The song the FBI investigated

Louie is also, inescapably, a song. Richard Berry wrote "Louie Louie" in 1955 — the lyric is a sailor telling a bartender he has to leave to get back to his girl — and the Kingsmen's 1963 recording turned it into something nobody could quite make out, because the vocal is an unintelligible mumble over a loud organ.

That unintelligibility caused a real federal investigation. A rumour went round that the record was obscene, parents wrote to the FBI, and the Bureau spent more than two years on it. In May 1964 the FBI laboratory reported that it could not make out the lyrics even after playing the record at different speeds, and could find nothing objectionable in what it could hear. The file is public.

So a dog called Louie will, at some point, be greeted with "Louie Louie, oh baby" by a man of a certain age. This is not avoidable. It is part of the name, in the way that a dog called Ringo will hear about the drummer.

How it sounds when you call

LOO-ee. What makes the name work is the vowel in the middle: it sits in the range a dog hears most sharply, and unlike most vowels it can be stretched rather than clipped, so the name travels further than its two syllables suggest.

The weak part is the opening. /l/ is a quiet consonant; it does not cut through wind the way a /k/ or a /b/ does. The first syllable is therefore the one most likely to be lost and the vowel is the one doing the work. Call the ending, and hold it.

It shortens to Lou with nothing lost, which is unusually useful: you get a long affectionate version and a short sharp one for recall, and they do not sound like two different names. Just be consistent about which is which. A dog that hears Louie for cuddling and Lou for coming will learn both perfectly well — but only if you never mix them up.

See also: Louis · Lou · Luca · Lewis · Luigi

Common questions