We recently asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us about the pet names they have for their significant other, and vice versa. Here are some of the best responses:
1. Mi Torta.
"We call each other 'mi torta'. On one episode of Steven Universe, Amethyst drops her sandwich and goes, 'Noooo, mi torta!' So whenever anything annoying/inconvenient would happen to me or him, we'd say 'Noooo, mi torta!' Eventually, it just evolved into 'mi torta' being a pet name."
—Blaire Marie, Facebook
2. Sweet Babboo and Panda.
"We call each other 'sweet babboo' (from Peanuts) or 'panda' (from pandas being cute and round and non-confrontational)."
—Andrea Norman, Facebook
3. Butt.
"We call each other 'butt'. It started because I like my husband's butt. I just think it's cute. So we started calling each other honeybutt, sweetiebutt, fuzzybutt, etc. And now, after about a dozen years of marriage, we conversationally call each other 'butt'."
—Jill Hogg, Facebook
4. Gasselope and Farticus.
"We are both very gassy individuals, so we call each other 'gasselope' and 'farticus'."
5. Kiisu, Tikutopsibaleriin, and Mõmmi.
"This will probably sound weird because of the linguistic differences, but apart from the basic pet names... in Estonian, I call her 'kiisu', which translates to a shortened, diminutive version of 'kitten', and 'tikutopsibaleriin', which translates to 'matchbox ballerina'. She calls me 'mõmmi', which translates to a childish diminutive of a bear — in Estonian folkore, the bear says 'mõmm-mõmm' and is generally depicted as a friendly giant. It's cuter in Estonian, trust me."
—Johan Pärjamäe, Facebook
6. Sir.
"Me and my boyfriend call each other 'Sir'. We don't even go by our regular names. We even have our friends calling us 'The Sirs'."
7. Natashington, Captain Bloodcrotch, Squirt Sacks, Pookie, and Pootersaurus Rex.
"My husband loves making up themed nicknames for me. I have a patriotic name (Natashington), a pirate name (Captain Bloodcrotch), a breastfeeding name (Squirt Sacks), and a sweetheart name (Pookie) to name a few. But I think my favorite name of them all is my dinosaur name: 'Pootersaurus Rex'."
8. Rod.
"My boyfriend calls me 'Rod' — sometimes, 'Rod the Bod.' I cared for him after a major surgery, and he started calling me Rodney while on pain meds, for reasons he still cannot explain. It stuck."
9. Chicken.
"My boyfriend and I call each other chicken. It's a really long story that dates back to one of our favorite date nights during our first year of dating. Long story short, I ordered a very pungent chicken dinner and from then on, we started referring to anything that smelled bad as a 'stinky chicken'. Two years later, and the 'stinky' faded away, creating an inside joke turned pet name!"
—Abbie Brady
10. Tooshie.
"My husband calls me 'tooshie' because we saw this really old couple in a store several years ago and the man could barely walk but he gently grabbed his wife's butt and said, 'Don't forget my denture glue, Tooshie.' We thought that was so precious! The name just stuck."
11. Littlefoot and Sharptooth.
"I'm 4'10" and my husband is 6'2". My shoes can fit inside his shoes, so he calls me 'Littlefoot' and I call him 'Sharptooth'."
12. Zsas.
"One day, my much-younger baby brother (who had never said my actual name) started calling me 'Zsa Zsa'. He'd say it whenever I entered a room while making a hand-waving motion near his head. We eventually deduced that this started right after he had watched me blow dry my hair several times — the 'za' was his version of the sound the hair dryer makes. As a toddler, he eventually shortened this to just 'Zsas' and it got to the point where hearing him call me Rachel was just weird. Anyway, my now-husband heard this story when we first started dating and immediately began calling me 'Zsas' and it just stuck. During our wedding ceremony, our officiant gave him his vows to repeat: 'I, Eric, take you, Rachel,' and he said back, 'I, Eric, take you, Zsas.' I think I was the only one who heard him say 'Zsas,' but it was one of my favorite moments of our wedding day."
—Rachel Wilkerson Miller, Facebook
14. Ty and Phoid.
"I'm an Indonesian who met my American boyfriend in the middle of a jungle in Papua. Everybody said that you haven't visited Papua yet if you haven't got either malaria and/or typhoid while you were there, which was true. Before we started dating, my boyfriend and I went for a swim in a river there, a few days later we both were diagnosed with typhoid. We laughed about it and then he said, 'I'm gonna start calling you "Phoid".' And then I said, 'I'll call you "Ty," then.' Ever since that moment, that's how we address each other. Let's just hope that we won't name our future kids 'Diar' and 'Rhea'."
15. Kitten and Sunflower.
"I call her 'kitten' and she calls me 'sunflower'; I call her my favorite thing and she calls me hers."
16. Big Tuna and Little Tuna.
"My boyfriend is 'Big Tuna' and I'm 'Little Tuna'. Sometimes, just 'Tuna'. We binge-watched The Office together from the beginning and we both thought that Andy's nickname for Jim (Big Tuna) was hilarious. We started calling each other 'Tuna' jokingly. Three years later, we probably use 'Tuna' more than we do our own names!"
17. Bun and Bao.
"My boyfriend and I used to tour in a band together. One time, after playing a show in Shanghai, we were insanely hungry and he offered to go downstairs to the 7-11 to get vegetable buns. In preparation, I taught him how to say vegetable bun in Chinese, which is 'bao tse yo tsai'. The problem is that if you say 'bao tse' with the incorrect inflection, it sounds like the Chinese word for newspaper. In our hangry state, we were stressed about this.
When he came back from 7-11 with the buns, he told me that no one could understand what he was saying, and he just decided to buy all of the buns in the hopes that one of them was a vegetarian one. We laughed about the thought of him trying to order a vegetable bun in his busted-up Mandarin, and to this day, I call him Bun and he calls me Bao."
—Peggy Wang