Alice ranks #457 with 267 entries, registered female. The name comes from Old French Aalis (a shortened form of Adelais, Germanic for noble kind). Modern American adoption sits at the cross-section of Alice in Wonderland, vintage-revival aesthetics, and a steady cohort of owners reaching for unfussy classic English names.
The Lewis Carroll and Disney layers
Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the 1951 Disney animated adaptation are the dominant cultural anchors. The 2010 Tim Burton live-action remake brought the name to a fresh generation of pet owners. Owners picking Alice often have a specific Wonderland-coded aesthetic in mind — slightly whimsical, slightly Victorian, knowingly literary.
Sound fit and breed lean
Two syllables (AL-iss), front-stressed, with a soft fricative ending that gives the name a quiet, refined finish. The name lands well on elegant, refined breeds — Cavaliers, Whippets, Italian Greyhounds, Bichons, Poodles, and gentle mixed breeds. There is also a meaningful cluster of cats, particularly tabby and tortoiseshell shorthairs where the literary register lands well.
The vintage-revival fit
Alice sits in the same revival cluster as Eloise, Beatrice, Margot, and Hazel — old human names that millennial and Gen-Z owners have rescued from semi-retirement and applied to pets with affection rather than irony. The owner cluster skews design-aware and slightly Anglophilic. The human Alice page shows the SSA chart climbing steadily through the 2010s and 2020s, mirroring the pet-naming pattern almost exactly.