Elsa ranks #420 with 295 entries, registered female. The name is a German short form of Elisabeth, but the entire current wave of pet-naming traffic owes itself to one very specific cultural event: Disney's Frozen (2013) and its sequel (2019), which made Elsa one of the most recognizable princess names in the world.
The Frozen lineage is unmissable
Owners picking Elsa for a pet adopted between roughly 2014 and now are almost universally referencing Frozen, often because a child in the household named the pet. The name reads icy, regal, slightly powerful — the Elsa of the films rather than the older Elisabeth nickname register. Pre-2013 Elsas were rarer and usually reached through German family heritage or through Born Free's lioness Elsa (1966).
Breed lean and color fit
Elsa lands disproportionately on white, silver, and pale-coated breeds where the Frozen visual matches: Samoyeds, white Huskies, Maltese, and white Shepherds. Siberian Huskies and Samoyeds wearing Elsa are among the most common pairings on the chart, which makes sense — the icy palette aligns directly with the pop-culture reference.
The dated-already counter-reading
Worth flagging: Frozen is now over a decade old, and the name has started to read slightly time-stamped. A puppy named Elsa in 2026 still works, but the cultural air around the name has thinned. The human Elsa page shows the SSA chart spike around 2014-2015 followed by a gentle plateau, which is a typical Disney-spike trajectory.