Mugsy ranks at #630 with 196 entries, registered male. The name is a 1930s-American gangster-movie nickname that has carried over almost entirely into pet naming, with a particular concentration on stocky, square-jawed breeds where the visual matches the gangster register.
The gangster-movie inheritance
Mugsy as a stock-character name dates to the Bowery Boys film series and the broader pulp tradition of giving secondary tough-guy characters short, hard, slightly-comic nicknames. The name has barely lived on a human-naming chart in decades, but it has stayed alive on pets because the register is so directly visual: a flat-faced, broad-chested dog reads as a Mugsy in a way few other names trigger.
The Looney Tunes overlay
For older owners, Mugsy carries an additional anchor through Looney Tunes: Mugsy is the small dim-witted bulldog henchman to Rocky in the 1940s-onward shorts. The cartoon overlay reinforces the bulldog-coded register and pushes Mugsy toward the comedic-affection end of the gangster-name spectrum.
Breed lean and sound
The name lands almost exclusively on stocky, flat-faced breeds: Bulldogs, French Bulldogs, pugs, Boston Terriers, and bulldog mixes. Two syllables, front-stressed (MUG-zee), with a hard plosive opening and a soft trailing ending. The shape recalls cleanly. The human Mugsy page shows essentially no SSA presence; the name has lived almost entirely on pets and fictional gangsters for a century. Browse the broader pet name index for adjacent vintage-male picks.