Baby ranks #78 with 1,213 entries, and it is one of the most contested names in the entire pet-naming canon. Owners either love it or refuse to consider it. The name straddles the line between an actual proper noun and a generic endearment that someone forgot to replace, and the data shows both types of households committing to it.
The endearment-frozen-in-place
A meaningful share of pet Babies are dogs and cats whose owners initially called the animal "baby" as a temporary stand-in — for the first week, while waiting for the right name to arrive — and then simply never got around to changing it. The name calcified through repetition. By the time the owner realized the dog had a name, the dog had been answering to it for months.
This is not a story unique to Baby. Sweetie, Buddy, and Honey all show similar calcification patterns. But Baby is the most extreme. Owners who name their pet Baby on purpose are sometimes faintly defensive about it, in a way owners of other names rarely are. The name is so transparently affectionate that it skirts being a name at all.
Where it lands
Breed-wise, Baby performs strongly on small companion dogs — Chihuahuas, Yorkies, Maltese, Pomeranians, Toy Poodles. The fit is direct: the dog is small enough to be picked up like an infant, and the name encodes that physical relationship. The name also performs well on rescue dogs of any size where the owner has a strong protective bond — the recovered ex-fight dog, the fearful senior, the hospice foster who became a forever pet.
Counter-reading: the name has a Dirty Dancing reading that occupies a smaller but distinct cohort. Owners who came to the name through the 1987 film picked Baby for a different reason — the character, not the endearment. These dogs are usually larger and more spirited than the typical Baby. The reference has faded, but it gave the name a brief mainstream pulse during the late 1980s and early 1990s that left a residue in the data.
The strangest fact about Baby
The name does not cross to children. Baby has never appeared as a real human name on the SSA charts in modern American naming. There is no baby Baby page with serious data, because no parent registers an actual child as Baby. The pet version exists in a kind of cultural pocket — a name that humans use only on animals, by social convention. That separation is rare. Most pet names eventually drift toward children. Baby has stayed put on the pet side, and probably always will.