What’s in a Name?
In the beginning, all SIM horses were created by the CPU. Many had dreadful names. So I was really excited when we were allowed to breed and name our own. Please leave a reply telling us how you choose your names. If you don’t use a specific method, at least give a shout out to your most creatively named steeds.
The most common way seems to be using the names of the sire and dam. For instance, my Nom de Course, nextbonus, is taken from my favorite real life racehorse. Next Bonus was a stakes winning standardbred pacer that my partner and I imported from Australia. His sire was What’s Next and his dam was Spring Bonus. Many of my SIM steeds have been similarly named.
Over the years I’ve used many and varied naming methods. I fell in love with prehistoric creatures as a child. Several of my ponies have carried ancient animal monikers. The best of the bunch was Ice Age Predator from the first crop of Fusaichi Pegasus. He was a multiple graded winner and my first Derby starter.
Song titles and lyrics are also great naming devices. Valleri (The Monkees) is my most recent song titled stakes winner. Her dam was also named for a Monkees hit (Take a Giant Step) as is grand dam, Steppin’ Stone.
I carry a piece of paper in my pocket to write down names while I drive. Street names, signs, stores, schools, people and songs from the radio. School names currently racing for me include UCLA Bruin and one of my alma maters, Wright College.
My most recent “go to” sire for relatively inexpensive breedings is Adelaide. Australia’s capitol is located on the south coast so most of my Adelaides carry the “South Coast” prefix. My previous “go to” sire was Adlerflug. That name doesn’t really go with anything in my mind so all my Adlerflugs had whatever name popped into my mind at the time of breeding.
I have a stable named wildriver. I saw a horse racing at Yonkers raceway named Wild River something. I liked it! So now I have my own bunch of Wild Rivers. Another of my stables is palindrome. It is home to Noon, Naan and Do Geese See God among others.
MIke has been fairly liberal in allowing “off color” names if they are creative, subtle and/or not overly offensive. I’ve been guilty of pushing the envelope a few times. I’m not going to out myself here. Most of mine are retired and you can peruse my stables to find a few more. I love the transparency of the game.
Sometimes I’ll go down the same path with a lot of a mare’s offspring. Summary Judgment had 15 babies before retiring. They include Material Witness, Cause of Action, Without Prejudice, File a Dec, Leading Question, Cheaper to Settle, Baliff, Jury Selection, Legal Issue and Alternate Juror.
I’ve also named quite a few after real life thoroughbreds and standardbreds. No current examples as all mine that fit this category are retired.
So spill. How do you name your horses? I’d love to know. Thanks!
Fun topic! For my bluebloods I try and have a theme for my names. Last year I started with episode titles from one of my favorite tv shows, Babylon 5 and then moved on to names of whales of the pacific northwest. I will occasionally divert from a theme if there is something I really want to use otherwise (last year I’m A Fanhausen was one). When I am breeding cheap horses I’ll just use whatever comes into my head, typically what was most recently said on tv.
Many of mine are alternative spellings e.g. Ab’s Orb Ant, Good Arro, Minz Spies – I try to have some part of the pedigree represented in the names but sometimes it’s just something that makes me smile when I think of it. Following at least 7 possible (failed) combinations on one particular breeding, I now have one named: ‘Who Broke The Name’.
Last year I named all my two-year olds beginning with the word PIZZA and this year I have decided to use HOT ROD.
Pizza Kanikani
Hot Rod Kanikani
When I first started playing I would use Google Translate and name the horse base on the names of the Sire and Mare but would translate from English to the language where the Sire was from. This made for some interesting names that were hard to pronounce. TSUKURU BUSHI for example.
A long time ago I ran a fictional racing newspaper, in which there were fictional races, with fictional horses running in them. A lot of my names are from that. I often used sire and mare names which came from RL breedings, e.g. a yearling by Tate Gallery ex Finlandia I called Northern Tate. This was in RL a horse called Suomi. Sometimes I just used phrases that someone said at the time I was trying to think of a name, e.g. Few Old Sticks was what my father said when describing his grapevine after it had been cut back, but hoped there would be a good harvest next year. Sometimes the name is from what I was thinking at the time, e.g. Might As Well Run, because I had intended to have a rest from the Sim but that didn’t happen. I Am De Best was named after an owner at the Cheltenham Festival a few years ago. Cracking’ Flags is named after a saying where I live when the weather is very hot, which I thought was a clever name based on his pedigree. I don’t have themes or prefixes for my horse names.
Thanks to those who have posted. Very interesting and exactly what I was hoping for.
Keep it up!
Words to live by… “The only thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.” -Neil Gaiman.
Nice article. When choosing names, I do various things. It may be a combo of the name of the sire and mare. I may look around the room and see like my File Cabinet, there’s a name. It could be a store I recently visited such as Cracked Gadgets where I got my cell phone fixed. Naming your horses is actually a fun part of the game where everyone can use their own creativity and something we get to do and that is not randomized by the sim. Thanks again for your article.
I use all sorts of things. Book names, book places, places, national parks, things around the places the mare or sires name, song titles (and then pieces of lyrics for the foals of that horse), and whatever pops into my head or mashes together with the sire and dam. Also I have been known to get tired of naming and put parts or all of the sire and dam’s names into my phone and using text prediction or random generators to name foals. Definitely depends but most of my “nicer” foals are song titles or book things. For example my big mare GRAVENOBARTOMYCALL was named because I got a Galileo share right around when he passed and the inscription from a large plot device of a book series I had been reading for two years just was in my head and seemed right. So some with lots of intent and some without any intent lol.
Great article Next, the naming of your horses in this game is one of the greatest pleasures I derive from participating in it. Way back when I began here, I wasn’t into the breeding side in fact in my first 3 years I only bred I think 8 horses. All came out as ” ******* Cyclone” and very little imagination was used Cat 1 Cyclone thru to Cat 5 Cyclone for instance. My best ever breeding was Middle Jewel winner “New Found Cyclone” using a first year sire “Newfoundland” and is still that sires only group winner.
Now I do a lot more breeding and (at least in my mind) I use much more imagination in the naming of my precious babies. Mainly from the names of their pedigree (or their meanings). An example would be “Men Free Zone” (Not This Time x Delhomme x Midshipman) Not this time = a Negative connotation and Men from Homme and Man so No Men became “Men Free Zone”
Pushing the envelope a tad, not really well maybe lol with “King Cnut” (Note this was NOT a typo), google Cnut and check “King Cnut’s” breeding and all will be revealed 🙂
50 Credits sent to the 1st person who messages me in game who can tell me how my horse “Balyunmirr” gets her name (bet you can’t do it without using google)
Once again a really great and thought provoking article Next …. Loved it Next!
There were some really off names at different times in the sim. Ol’ Reacharound springs to mind as well Pink Hunt. Some really clever one’s too. I liked Gulliver for one of the early Giant’s Causeway offspring and can remember thinking Next’s Ice Age Predator was a really cool name. I go in fits and starts, named a heap of 2yr olds using brutal last season. Way back I had a run on Urban’s. I’ve also named a heap of horses after resorts in Bali at different times. If I’m struggling I will fall back on the sire/ds names and try and come up with something clever
Naming horses is one of the fun things about playing this game, I try to be as creative as possible or have themes or characters -IRL one of the best owners for naming her horses was the late Queen Elizabeth, so much thought went into some clever names.
Some of my own favourites are
Take The Credit (Acclamation x Credit Country) and her daughter Annual Rate (by Calyx)
Hallmarked (Halling x Kearsarge Gold) and daughter Goldwasser (by Invincible Spirit)
Catchpenny (Ten Sovereigns x Catch Fire)
Speaking Clock (Oratorio x Auror’s Watch)
Gilt Ridden (Pivotal x Assay Office)
Dicentra (Calyx x Pour My Heart Out)
The Red Carpet (New Approach x Movie Theater)
Lady Cassandra (Harbinger x Fell Asleep)
(And admittedly I have named a couple of fillies after ‘ladies of ill repute’ shall we say…)
I should get royalties for my old BTB article on the subject, Bonus…
Names keep getting harder to come by these days. I prefer truer racehorse-y names for the most part to the comedic or naughty touch, though sometimes, in the case of my Mission Impazible-Wedding Bell Blues filly, the threads all come together. Missionaryposition, anyone?
On my non-bargain horses, I work overtime trying to get the right name, and hope I don’t copy a recent horse. If I’m in a zone, it comes quickly. Tolleson’s new filly by Violence couldn’t give me something in the legal realm, so I opted for the traditional filly name Kiss Me Goodbye. Usually, song titles, album names, the occasional lyric is an easy go-to. Pop culture also works, and then, in the case of Creeping Terror, Torgo, and Mrxl (pronounced Exactly As It Says On The Tin), my recent MST3K fascination helps.
On my bargain or cheaper horses, unless something comes to mind, I go back to some old standbys. Names of horses I remember from when I first got interested in racing, names of horses I remember from when I got re-interested in racing, they usually do the trick.
I also still do something I wrote about a while back. I go through old newspapers, and find the names of bread-and-butter horses who passed away on the track, or off the track in fires and unfortunate incidents. It’s a good way, I think, to honor the sport’s contestants which deserve a second chance to flourish.
PS: When in doubt, use Wikipedia’s Random Article link. You would be surprise what inspires you.
Great writing and good comments, it’s fun and hard sometimes to fine a nice name for your next champions, well I mostly use to combine the names combination on the pedigree, a new song that I hear on iTunes or Facebook, horses names on Bloodhorse Daily or it’s articles names or situations that happen in life. Sure it’s the most fun and pleasant time in the game to find those names, GQ Warrior, Honest Kitty, Godiva Storm, Whispering Bird and others
Nice topic!
I generally don’t like just names compounded from sires or with added “trademark” work and I like some effort behind.
Mostly I am googling, “wikipeediing”, finding nice word combinations from songs’ lyrics, places from Google Maps, sometimes using Urban Dictionary. And sometimes I have mares for which I use special rule. For example – foals’ names start with same letter as their mother. One has foals with their names rhyming to her’s. One mare’s foals were only named by songs from Thivery Corporation beginning with S. And I also have dam named “Lala Salama” (should be “good night” in Swahili) and her foals’ names have to mean or be somehow connected with Africa and the same rule is applied for all foals of those foals… so one day my stables will probably consist only of horses named after African words, places, phrases, terms etc. 🙂
Oh and the most infuriating thing finding that PERFECT NAME and typing it in the name field only to look up and see you ran out of characters
Recently bred Ace High x War Dancer x Stravinsky
wanted “Doing the Dogfight Dance” (inspired by Doing the Neutron Dance)
so ended up with Dogfight Waltz
This is only a specific example as opposed to a broad one, but one of my first good fillies that became a strong producing broodmare was Heaven’s Gate. I don’t even remember how I came up with that name, or why I picked it. But given that her name is the same as the cult well known for some oddball behavior and mass suicide back in the 90’s, I’ve made it my mission to make everything not only produced by her, but everything produced by one of her daughters or even granddaughters have names somehow related to that cult.
Being a great producing HOF mare, I’ve kept a lot of her progeny and bred them, as well as bunch of the second and third generations. Maybe not every horse dating back to her has a themed name, but a lot do. Every single one that’s descended through her champion daughter Final Exit has them. And it’s getting really difficult to find new ones, because I’ve exhausted almost every possible reference and most proper nouns related to Heaven’s Gate. I’ve had to be creative lately coming up with the newer ones, but I consider it a challenge to find something that hasn’t been used yet.
Yup, naming ’em is fun… I am a big fan of old traditional jazz (ragtime thru the swing era) and like to use old tune names or old jazz terms or famous jazz locales or jazz personalities for many of my babies, sometimes finding a way to include a reference to a horse’s pedigree if I can think of something that works in 18 characters, such as one of my best horses ever, a son of Java Gold named JUMPIN’ JAVA.
Other jazzy horse names I’ve done in the last couple years: DYNAMIC JAZZ, BIXIE’S CHARGE, LITTLEROCKGETAWAY, NO NAME JIVE, CAROLINA SHOUT and many more.
Sometimes I just get silly: PEPPERONI POPCORN, SIRE CARDASHIAN.
Here’s a horse racing trivia-based one… SHAFTER VEE
Can anyone here figure out where I picked that name up from?
Beats me !! (SHAFTER VEE)
naming my horses is the best part of the game for me because if the horse dont be successful ,people will still remember the name…i name mine after things going on in my life,,,food, brass bands, movies ,how im feeling at the time lol…. funny thing is , my crazy and wild names became stakes winners..
best breeding mare retired i think 3 years ago….Well ill be damed…
stakes winners and all were bargin breeds under 10-50bps..to name a few…
godfather=stakes
nickel bag=G1
dime sak=G3
sea sick= G1
i owe back taxes= G1
fifty yards=G2
what what ok=stakes
Love naming all my new babies! Usually I try to get clever with the dam’s and sire’s names like my 2 year old colt sired by Acrobat is named Flying Grayson after Dick Grayson since he was in the circus. I have one mare where the offspring have to be named very specifically because she was my first stakes placed horse. Her name is Beleuir and her babies either have to have Bel or -euir in their names. Then their offspring have to follow the same rule. Her best baby so far is Tycoon Seveuir, sired by Written Tycoon, who has won a Group 2 race.
Answer to my above trivia question regarding recently-bred SHAFTER VEE:
Willie Shoemaker’s first winning ride, at Golden Gate Fields in 1949, was aboard a horse called SHAFTER V.
I actually hate naming horses. How I come up with them is beyond me. It’s mostly how I’m feeling at the time. If I’m annoyed by something, it will show up in the name. If it’s a holiday or some kind of occasion, that may show up in a name. Sometimes I’ll grab an old Horseman & Fair World if I’m really stuck.