Why does Lola, a name that peaked culturally in 1970, still rank #6 among American pet names in 2026? The Kinks released the song that year. The film Run Lola Run arrived in 1998. Both are old. And yet 4,957 dogs and cats in our combined NYC and Seattle dataset answer to it, which puts her ahead of every name introduced since 2010.
The celebrity-pet pipeline
Most pet-name pop culture is about fictional pets — Lassie, Toto, Snoopy. Lola is unusual in that her cultural lift comes from real celebrity pets. Jennifer Lopez has had multiple dogs named Lola. The Kardashian-adjacent celebrity pet ecosystem of the late 2000s and early 2010s churned out enough Lolas to push the name into magazine coverage during exactly the years owners now in their thirties were forming their first opinions about pet names. The fictional-pet pipeline matters for names like Milo, where Milo and Otis did the heavy lifting. The real-pet pipeline matters more for Lola.
That distinction has consequences for the breed distribution. Lola is concentrated in Chihuahuas (#2) and Yorkies in our data — the celebrity-dog breeds of the early-2010s tabloid era. She does not perform especially well on Labradors or Goldens, which is the opposite pattern from Luna or Bella. That gap is the cleanest signal we have that pet-name adoption follows the breed someone imagines they are getting — even when the dog they actually get turns out to be smaller, fluffier, and pinker than the original celebrity reference.
What "sassy" actually means in our data
You will see Lola described as a "sassy" name across most pet-naming sites. The word does real work, but not for the reason most people assume. Owners pick Lola not because the dog has some pre-existing sassy personality, but because they want to signal that personality — to themselves, to other dog-park parents, to social media. The name is aspirational. It is the pet equivalent of buying a leather jacket. You can see this most clearly in the small-breed-rescue pipeline, where dogs get renamed by their adopters and Lola tends to replace something more functional like "Pepper" or "Brownie." The new name is doing identity work.
This is, incidentally, why Lola almost never gets given to a Golden Retriever puppy at eight weeks old. Golden owners pick names that fit who the puppy already is. Small-breed adopters, especially of older rescue dogs, pick names that fit the owner's vision of who the dog could become.
The baby-name version is mostly orthogonal
Lola is in the SSA top 200 for girls and has been gently climbing since the early 2000s, but the human and pet versions don't share much demographic overlap. The baby Lola page shows a different profile — younger urban parents, a different cultural register. Owners and parents are picking the same letters for somewhat different reasons.