Casper ranks at #182 with 577 entries, and the name has been carrying the friendly-ghost register since the 1939 cartoon and the 1995 film. It functions both as a literal-descriptor name for white pets and as a personality-coded name for shy or gentle ones, which is unusual for pet names at this rank.
The dual-function naming pattern
Casper sits in the white-pet cluster with Snow and Ghost, but it also crosses into a quieter category that the other two do not occupy, where the choice signals an animal that is slightly invisible, retiring, or hard-to-find around the house. Cats who hide under the bed disproportionately end up Casper. The name does double duty in a way that pure color-descriptor names cannot.
One counter-reading: Casper is also the German and Dutch form of Caspar, one of the traditional Three Wise Men. A small subset of Casper pet owners — particularly those with European-heritage households or those who chose the name in December — are working that older religious register rather than the friendly-ghost one. The two registers overlap but are not identical.
Where the name lands by breed
White cats, Samoyeds, Maltese, and Westies over-index strongly on Casper. The two-syllable trochaic shape (CAS-per) projects well at distance, which makes it functional as well as cute and gives the name an edge over softer-sounding alternatives like Snow for owners who care about recall reliability. The Casper baby name page shows the human chart, where the name remains rare in American naming despite recent slow growth. The pet-naming slot is where Casper does most of its current cultural work.