Abutting Hollywood and covering part of the Santa Monica Mountains, Los Feliz is a neighborhood named after José Vicente Feliz, who is its colonial Spanish-Mexican land grantee. Along with present-day Griffith Park, Los Feliz makes up the original Rancho Los Feliz land concession.

Pronunciation of the neighborhood varies between the modern /lɔːs fiːlɪz/ (“laws-FEEL-iz”) and the original [los feˈlis] (“Los Feh-LEES”), depending on who you ask. The original pronunciation stems from the Spanish “the ones from the Feliz family” (“feliz” meaning happy in English).