Puppy ranks at #583 with 211 entries, registered male. The honest reading is that a meaningful slice of these entries are paperwork artifacts — owners brought a young dog to the licensing office without a settled name yet, wrote "Puppy" on the form, and never updated the registration once the real name was chosen.
The placeholder problem
Pet licensing in most American cities uses a renewal-on-the-honor-system model, which means an early-life placeholder name can persist on the registry for the entire life of the animal. The 211 Puppy entries almost certainly represent a mix of (a) actual adult dogs whose owners committed to the placeholder, (b) puppies still in their first registration year, and (c) registry rows that were never updated.
The committed-Puppy cohort
That said, a real cohort of owners do commit to Puppy as the permanent name. The naming logic is intentional: the dog is forever a puppy in the owner's eyes, the name is funny, and the dog never seems to mind. The cohort skews toward owners with a self-aware sense of humor and toward small breeds where the visual register of the dog supports the joke for life.
Sound and breed lean
Two syllables, front-stressed (PUP-ee), with a hard percussive opening. The name recalls cleanly across moderate distances and works on small breeds, including Dachshunds, Pomeranians, and small rescue mixes. The human Puppy page shows essentially zero SSA presence, leaving the pet version to claim the cultural space. For more in this register, browse the broader pet name index.