Lady is the Disney name. With 1,667 entries at rank #45, she traces almost entirely to a single 1955 film — Lady and the Tramp — and the cultural anchor has been doing pet-naming work for seventy years without significant decay. Almost no one names a Cocker Spaniel Lady today without the film being part of the household conversation, even if the conversation is short.
The Cocker Spaniel template
Lady in the film is a Cocker Spaniel, and the breed concentration in our data shows the template still operating. Lady performs well above her overall position on Cocker Spaniels — both American and English — and underperforms on most other breeds. The visual specificity of the cultural anchor is, again, doing breed-filtering work. Owners who pick Lady for a non-Cocker are typically picking for the register (gentle, slightly old-fashioned) rather than the visual.
The film's 2019 live-action remake gave the name a small contemporary boost and reinforced the Cocker visual for a new generation of viewers. Most Disney pet names are anchored to specific breed types this way — Pongo and Perdita to Dalmatians, Pluto loosely to Bloodhounds. Lady's anchor is one of the most durable.
The register problem
Lady reads as gendered-formal in a way most modern pet names avoid. "Lady" as a common noun is doing register work that contemporary parents and pet owners increasingly find slightly outdated. Compare with Princess, which is similarly gendered-formal but reads as ironically affectionate rather than just formal. Lady doesn't have that ironic register available — the name reads sincere, which means it works on dogs who can plausibly carry the elegance and reads slightly off on dogs who can't.
Phonetic profile
Two syllables, soft L opening, hard D in the middle, clipped "ee" ending. Lady is recall-respectable — the D consonant break is doing the percussive work the soft L opening lacks. Park performance is acceptable for the small-to-mid Spaniels and similar breeds the name typically lands on.
Lady isn't a baby name
Lady sits well below the SSA top 1000 with no movement. American parents read Lady as too definitionally a title-noun to function as a first name. That gives pet owners uncontested access. The baby Lady page shows the minimal human use.