Prince is the male-side complement to Princess, but the data shows they're not symmetric. With 2,080 entries at rank #33, Prince underperforms Princess (#17) by a meaningful margin, and the gap tells you something about how owners gender royalty in pet contexts. Princess works as a private declaration; Prince reads as more formal, slightly more distant. Owners reach for it less often even when the household-affection logic would predict the same usage.
The royalty register, asymmetric
Princess gets used on small dogs whose owners want to declare them adored. Prince gets used on larger, more dignified-looking dogs whose owners want to declare them stately. The gendering of the royalty register is sharper than for most other paired names — Prince concentrates on German Shepherds, Rottweilers, and the more imposing Doberman variants in our data, while Princess concentrates on toy breeds. The bodies and the names are matched in opposite directions.
What's worth noticing is the German Shepherd association specifically. Prince has been a default male name on shepherds for at least 50 years, partly because the breed's working-line Germanic background carries an implicit nobility. Owners reaching for Prince on a shepherd are completing a visual and historical match that Princess on a Yorkie achieves through different logic.
The Michael Jackson and Prince Rogers Nelson factor
The pop star Prince (1958-2016) probably contributed to the name's continued use as a pet name, though the trajectory shows no sharp spike around his death. The Disney convention of naming royal characters Prince [Something] also keeps the name available in the cultural register without anchoring it to anyone specific. Prince is a name that benefits from diffuse cultural reinforcement rather than any single source.
Prince on the human side is rare
Prince sits well below the SSA top 1000 for boys and shows no movement. American parents read it as too definitionally a title to function as a first name. That gives pet owners uncontested access — Prince joins the pet-only pool alongside Princess, Buddy, and Lucky. For owners who want a stately name with no household-overlap risk, Prince is one of the few options.