Winter ranks at #290 with 391 entries, sitting cleanly in the season-name cluster that has shaped female pet naming alongside botanicals over the last decade. The name carries a cool, slightly elegant register that tracks beautifully with white and silver coats.
The season-name pattern
Winter clusters with Summer, Autumn, and Willow in the nature-coded female register. There is a real adoption-month effect: pets adopted in December and January get Winter at meaningfully higher rates than the underlying chart position would suggest. The naming-by-circumstance pattern is one of the more honest mechanisms in pet naming.
Sound and breed fit
The two-syllable shape (WIN-ter) has a soft front and a hard middle, which gives it a slightly sharper register than Summer. Winter lands on white, silver, and gray pets at much higher rates than warm-toned ones: Samoyeds, Huskies, white Persians, silver tabbies, and white-coated mixed breeds in particular. The visual rhyme between the cool name and the cool coat is doing real naming work.
The Marvel counter-reading
One reading worth flagging: Winter (Hailee Steinfeld) and the Winter Soldier (Bucky Barnes) gave the name a separate Marvel-coded register for a younger cluster of owners who came to it through the films rather than the season. That reading is secondary but real. The Winter baby name page shows the name climbing on the SSA chart since around 2015.