With names like Jamaica Me Laugh and Can’t Find My Keys, the thoroughbreds racing at Point-to-Point challenged the announcer’s diction almost as much as their opponents.

But naming thoroughbreds is not as simple as it seems, said George Strawbridge, a Unionville, Pa., resident who owns several horses that raced at Winterthur.

The Jockey Club, an organization that ensures all racehorses are correctly identified, provides specific rules about horse-naming and prohibits two horses from having the same name.

Each racehorse must have a unique name to avoid confusion at race tracks or in breeding sheds, said John Cooney, communications supervisor for The Jockey Club.

South Monarch, one of Strawbridge’s horses, is named after a street in Aspen, Colorado, Strawbridge said. He said he searches for horse names every year, but 90 percent of the names he submits to the club are rejected because they are already being used.

Cooney said the club receives several hundred name requests each day. The club uses phonetic software to test each name to make sure it does not sound similar to any of the 430,000 thoroughbred names in use.

About 200 names pass the phonetic test each day, said Cooney. These names are passed to a group of four people who check the names against the club’s rules.

According to the club’s rules, names cannot have more than 18 letters, cannot be identical to copyrighted words or the names of famous people and cannot be vulgar.

Last year, the club reviewed about 64,000 names and accepted about 43,000, he said. Most of the rejected names were rejected because they were identical to other horse’s names, said Cooney.

To make their names unique, some horse owners give their thoroughbreds silly names, said Rob Banner, a Middleburg, Va., resident, who owns a horse named Floor Play.

Banner said the horse was named when he bought it and he might have named it something different, but the name’s double entendre makes race fans chuckle.

“It was somebody’s idea of how to tongue-tie an announcer,” he said.