Maverick ranks #552 with 225 entries, registered male. The cultural anchor is unambiguous — Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, the Tom Cruise character from Top Gun (1986) and its 2022 sequel Top Gun: Maverick. The 2022 film recharged the name's pet-naming cycle, and the timing of the recent uptick lines up neatly with the sequel's release.
The Top Gun lineage
Maverick clusters with Goose, Iceman, and Viper in the Top Gun pet-naming cohort. Owners reaching for these names are usually deliberate fans of the franchise — the connection is explicit and the name does not work as a casual pick. The cohort skews older for the original film and younger post-2022.
Breed lean and sound fit
Three syllables (MAV-rik), front-stressed, with a clipped final consonant that lands sharply. Maverick shows up disproportionately on athletic, action-coded breeds — Labradors, German Shepherds, Australian Shepherds, Belgian Malinois, and working-line rescue mixes. The name and the energy profile match consistently.
The independent-spirit counter-reading
A subset of owners reach Maverick through the dictionary meaning — "an unorthodox or independent-minded person," originally from cattle rancher Samuel Maverick. The reading is real but quieter than the Tom Cruise anchor. The Maverick baby name page shows the SSA chart climbing steeply through the 2010s and spiking after 2022.
Owners reaching for Maverick often have a sibling pet named Goose, completing the on-the-nose Top Gun pairing. The multi-pet naming pattern is one of the most explicit franchise references on the chart.