Hazel ranks #77 with 1,215 entries and is one of the cleaner indicators of how thoroughly the cottagecore aesthetic reshaped American pet naming. The name was a Depression-era grandmother name in 1985. By 2018 it was the kind of name a millennial in a fern-filled apartment would pick for a tortie kitten. Few names have reinvented themselves this fast.
The vintage-name revival
Hazel sits in the same revival cluster as Olive, Honey, Daisy, and Ruby — names that were once assigned to elderly women and now, suddenly, to small female pets. The mechanism is fairly clear. Owners under forty associate these names with their great-grandmothers' photo albums rather than with anyone they currently know, which gave the names enough generational distance to feel fresh.
Breed-wise, Hazel performs strongly on Dachshunds, mid-size mixed breeds, tabby cats, and tortoiseshell cats. The brown-eye etymology shows up directly here — owners often pick the name to match the eye color, particularly on Dachshunds and on cats with notably warm-toned eyes. The visual reading is doing more work than the literary or grandmotherly readings.
The Watership Down footnote
Richard Adams' 1972 novel Watership Down features a male rabbit named Hazel, and a small but real share of Hazel registrations in the pet data are male animals — almost always rabbits — named after the character. This is a niche but persistent cohort. Rabbit owners are, as a group, more literarily motivated than the average pet owner, and Hazel functions as a quiet inside reference within that community.
Counter-reading: not every Hazel is part of the cottagecore wave. Older owners — usually in their sixties and seventies — sometimes pick the name as a deliberate tribute to a deceased relative. These dogs are typically Cocker Spaniels, mid-size mixes, or rescued seniors, and the name is doing memorial work rather than aesthetic work.
The human-name follow-through
Hazel is now in the SSA top 50 for girls and still climbing. The pet version led by roughly seven years, which is a fairly typical pet-leads-baby lag. Parents who name a daughter Hazel today are usually doing so after years of knowing several dogs and cats with the name, which is exactly how a name moves from the pet-name register back into mainstream baby naming. The baby Hazel page shows the climb. The eye-color etymology is back in active use on humans, after a roughly forty-year dormancy.