Why do they recycle Hurricane Names every 6 years?

I was reading a list of hurricane names and notice they recycle the names every six years. This is of course unless one of the hurricanes is large and well known then they retired the name, like they won’t have another hurricane named Andrew or Katrina.

Does anyone know why they recycle them after 6 years. Clearly there are hundreds of names and they ought to be able to think unique names, especially since they use the “ethnic” versions of names for hurricanes too.

I realize they man run out of names for some letters but they ought be able to go once every 25 or 50 years before they run out of some letters.

Source: Tropical Cyclone Names

It’s all about clarity, speed and memory retention while under stressful conditions. My WAG is the names are for the folks caught in the hurricanes and not the rest of us at home in our comfy chairs high and dry.

didn’t it use to be all male names in the Atlantic and all female names in the Pacific (or TOWA)? Is that something we lost to political correctness?

It used to be all female names. At first, meteorologists named hurricanes after their wives and girlfriends as a joke. Later it became systematic, and eventually male names were added after feminists started complaining about the rather blatant sexism.

And if they hadn’t done that in the first place, we would have called them himacanes.

I didn’t read the link, but if there are more than 26 tropical storms in a year, they’ll start using the Greek alphabet.

Not just will, they already did.