Witchy Cat Names

40 hand-picked witchy cat names from the Name Vault — plus how to make one stick.

How to Pick One

Worth saying at the outset that the familiar is largely an invention of the courtroom. A witch keeping an animal servant appears mostly in English witch trial records of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in confessions given under pressure and in the questions put to the accused, so it records what interrogators expected to hear rather than anything people did. With that cleared up, the names are excellent. Grimalkin is the strongest, an archaic English word for a cat and especially an old female one, and the familiar summoned in the opening scene of Macbeth. Hecate is the Greek goddess of crossroads and night. Circe is the enchantress of the Odyssey. Mandrake, Nightshade and Vervain come from European folk medicine, and the first two are genuinely poisonous, so take the name and leave the plant outside. Circe, Luna and Hazel land on the bright two-beat shape that gets answered fastest.

FAQ

How do I choose the right witchy cat name?

Say your top three out loud at feeding time — the one that feels natural to call across a room is the winner. Two-syllable names ending in a bright vowel get the fastest response.

Were black cats really witches' familiars?

Not as an actual practice. The familiar spirit in animal form belongs mainly to English witch trial material of the 1500s and 1600s, where it turns up in confessions extracted under interrogation and in leading questions asked of the accused. It reflects what the courts believed, not what anyone kept. Animals were sometimes killed alongside the condemned, which is a fact about the trials rather than about cats.

What does Grimalkin mean?

It is an old English word for a cat, particularly an elderly female one. The usual explanation combines grey with malkin, a diminutive of the name Maud or Matilda that was applied to cats and to untidy women. Its most famous outing is the first scene of Macbeth, where a witch answers a call from Graymalkin, which is how the word became shorthand for a witch's cat.

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