What’s in a name? For horses in the Kentucky Derby, quite a lot of pressure.

It must have been easy to name Essential Quality.

The morning line favorite for Saturday’s Kentucky Derby was sired by Tapit, who gave him his gray coat, and out of a mare named Delightful Quality, who was sired by Elusive Quality. What’s better than delightful or elusive? Well, essential, of course.

Several of this year’s Derby horses were named through their pedigree, which helps remind people of the strong bloodlines they should be betting on. So Hot Rod Charlie plays off his dam’s sire, Indian Charlie; Super Stock is out of Super Girlie; and Like the King’s sire is Palace Malice and dam is Like a Queen. Highly Motivated’s dam is Strong Incentive. Soup and Sandwich harks to dam Souper Scoop. O Besos, the Spanish word for kisses, is by Orb, out of Snuggs and Kisses.

Naming a racehorse is not easy, say the people who do it. First, you have to meet the stringent rules of The Jockey Club, which registers all Thoroughbred racehorses. Those include a limit of 18 characters, no famous people, nothing vulgar, and nothing already in rotation. There are 450,000 names in the Jockey Club database; owners can plug in their choices and find out if it’s already in use. Once a horse stops racing, most names are put back into circulation.

But it can also be a lot of fun, says Jonathan Green, racing manager for DJ Stable, which owns contender Helium with other family members.

“Naming horses is probably the most fun thing we do as a family,” Green said. They bought Helium as a yearling, partly because of his athleticism.

“He’s very light on his feet, so we were trying to think of something like Fred Astaire,” he said. “Then we thought of the periodic table, and Helium was available.”

The Greens do try to play off pedigrees; they recently bought an Irish filly sired by Caravaggio, who was named for the frequently rowdy and belligerent 17th-century Italian artist. “He was often escorted out of town, so we named her Brush with the Law,” Green said.

Not all owners take such care. One of Rock Your World’s owners, Kosta Hronis, sent a short email: “Nothing significant to it, just a name.”

And sometimes, it’s not even the owner who does the naming. Kenny McPeek, the Lexington-based trainer of Derby hopeful King Fury, said the horse’s owner, Paul Fireman, had had some health struggles and told McPeek to go ahead and name the horse. Not long before that, McPeek had watched Tyson Fury win his second heavyweight boxing championship. Fury is of Irish Traveller descent, and is sometimes called the Gypsy King. “I saw his championship that night, he was great, and the name just popped into my head,” McPeek said. (Update: King Fury was entered in the Kentucky Derby on Tuesday but was scratched from the race on Friday when he developed a fever.)

Trainer Todd Pletcher also influenced Dynamic One’s naming, according to one of his three owners, Mike Repole.

“The horse is owned in a three-way partnership with me, Vinnie and Teresa Viola and the Phipps family,” Repole said in an email. “I got the honor of naming him, which was a lot of pressure, especially when you have great partners like the Violas and the Phipps family. The horse was training with Todd Pletcher and Todd was really raving about how the horse was training and how he was doing really, really well.” Repole said he wanted to give him a special name that would speak to his talent, so he chose the name Dynamic One and “so far he’s living up to his potential.”

This year’s Derby features two nods to Kentucky’s signature liquor, Midnight Bourbon and Bourbonic. David Fisk, racing manager for Winchell Thoroughbreds, said he wished there was a better story, aside from Ron Winchell’s restaurant businesses and personal admiration of that amber liquid. However, Bourbonic’s notoriously press-shy owner Brad Kelley sent us a statement that Bourbonic is “a state of consciousness occasionally achieved upon the consumption of an ample sufficiency of bourbon.”

Many owners have backgrounds well outside of racing, like Vincent Viola, the West Point grad and Wall Street businessman. His bloodstock agent, John Sparkman said Known Agenda came out of both those worlds.

Saudi businessman Amr Zedan, who owns Medina Spirit, said the horse’s name was given by his friend Oussama Aboughazale, who owns Medina Spirit’s sire, Protonico. In addition, “Medina is is my ancestral home city located in the Hijaz region on the west coast (of) Saudi Arabia,” Zedan wrote in an email. “Medina is also considered one of the holy cities in Islam and contains the holy mosque and the burial of prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.”

Zedan added Spirit because it’s both synonymous with the holiness of Medina, and the horse has a forebear named Alpha Spirit. “I thought the addition of spirits would sound appropriate and add a nice touch to it.”

Mandaloun is both a type of mullioned window in Lebanon and a horse owned by Juddmonte Farms, the American branch of racing of Khalid Abdullah, a member of the royal House of Saud who died in January. Juddmonte Manager Garrett O’Rourke said the farm names 200 horses a year and “some of the nicer ones are given to the better horses.”

Religious beliefs are also important to the principals at WinStar Farm, so Sainthood made sense, said Linzay Marks, marketing director. “It represents our values and we try to name them something with values,” she said. One word names are also big there.

Mark Schwartz, owner of Brooklyn Strong, was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.

According to Kevin Moody of Cypress Creek Equine, Keepmeinmind was born and bred at Southern Equine Farm in Midway, and was a big, good looking colt when he was born. The farm manager is a big country music fan, of the Zac Brown Band, in particular. He loved their song “Keep Me In Mind” and asked if the colt could be named after the song.

And Hidden Stash might not mean what you think, although one previous horse named that did have a dam called Marijuana. No, Hidden Stash is about money because the principals of BBN Racing are money managers, and BBN tries to syndicate all its horses, said Braxton Lynch, the syndicate’s racing manager. Also the horse’s dam is Making Mark Money. The horse has its own logo, a pot of gold hidden in straw. And yes, BBN Racing is an homage to Big Blue Nation. “We’re trying to emulate the passion and knowledge that Kentucky basketball fans have about their sports,” Lynch said.

This story was originally published April 30, 2021 at 7:40 AM.