Griffin ranks at #651 with 188 entries, registered male. The name is a mythological-creature reference (the lion-eagle hybrid of Greek and Persian heraldic tradition) and a Welsh-origin human surname, and on a pet registry it lands as a slightly-mythic-but-still-grounded male pick with a clean phonetic shape.
The mythological-creature register
Griffin sits with Phoenix, Dragon, and Sphinx in the mythological-creature pet-naming pocket. Within that group Griffin is the most usable as a daily call-name because it doubles cleanly as a human surname-form, which means the dog can carry the mythic register without sounding overly dramatic at the dog park. The naming logic prizes that dual-register flexibility.
The Family Guy overlay
For a slice of millennial and Gen Z owners, Griffin carries a Peter Griffin overlay through the Family Guy franchise (Fox, 1999 onward). The cohort is real but rarely the primary reason for the choice; most owners are picking the mythic register first and accepting the sitcom-surname overlap as background noise. The overlay does not crowd out the heraldic reading.
Sound and breed lean
Two syllables, front-stressed (GRIF-in), with a hard plosive opening and a soft trailing N. The shape carries cleanly outside and recalls reliably. The name lands disproportionately on medium-to-large dignified breeds: Golden Retrievers, German Shepherds, Labradors, and large rescue mixes. The human Griffin page shows steady modern SSA growth; pet Griffin tracks alongside.