Zelda ranks at #293 with 390 entries, and it is one of the cleanest video-game-anchored female names on the chart. Nintendo's Princess Zelda (Legend of Zelda, 1986 onwards) gave the name its entire modern cultural meaning, and pet adoption has tracked that lineage across multiple generations of gamers.
The Nintendo lineage
Zelda clusters with Yoshi, Peach, and Luigi in the Nintendo-character register. These names show up disproportionately among owners in their late 20s to 40s — the cohort that grew up with the SNES and N64 eras and the 2017 Breath of the Wild revival. The pattern is one of the most consistent generation-anchored clusters in modern pet naming.
The Zelda Fitzgerald layer
Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948), F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, gave the name its earlier cultural anchor — a literary-leaning, slightly unconventional female name register that older or more bookish owners may pick instead. The two cultural reads coexist, and which one the owner is engaging with often correlates with age.
Sound and breed fit
The two-syllable shape (ZEL-dah) has a sharp front consonant and a sing-out ending, projection-friendly across long distances. Zelda lands on medium breeds at higher rates than very small ones: Australian Shepherds, mixed breeds, Vizslas, and confident cats in particular. The Zelda baby name page shows the name climbing on the SSA chart since around 2015 — the BotW era specifically.