Dallas ranks #452 with 270 entries, registered male. The name is a place-name borrowing — the Texas city, founded 1841 — that has migrated into American first-name use over the past few decades. As a pet name, Dallas carries a specific Texan-and-Americana register that owners reach for deliberately.
The TV and Texas layers
Two cultural threads keep Dallas in active rotation. The 1978-1991 prime-time soap Dallas gave the name decades of cultural saturation in American memory, with the Ewing family providing a permanent association with cowboy hats, oil money, and dramatic stakes. The Dallas Cowboys, Mavericks, and Stars provide ongoing sports-coded reinforcement. The name reads broad-shouldered and unmistakably Western.
Sound fit and breed lean
Two syllables (DAL-iss), front-stressed, with a soft fricative ending that gives the name a relaxed finish. The name lands well on athletic, broad-chested, or country-coded breeds — Labradors, Boxers, Australian Shepherds, Heelers, Catahoulas, and stocky mixed breeds with rural-American energy. There is a smaller but visible cluster on horses where the place-name lands directly on the species.
The regional-coded counter-reading
Worth flagging: Dallas reads strongly Texan, and that limits how the name lands in regions where that register is not the default. An owner in Boston picking Dallas is making a deliberate stylistic choice that some friends will read as charming and others will find affected. The human Dallas page shows steady SSA presence with the place-name-as-first-name pattern continuing.