Clara is from the Latin clarus — "clear, bright, illustrious." A top-100 US baby name since 2015, peaking at #93 in 2022. Clara Barton (1821-1912) — American teacher, nurse, and humanitarian; founder of the American Red Cross (1881) which she led for 23 years; one of the most-revered female humanitarian figures in US history; nicknamed the "Angel of the Battlefield" for her Civil War nursing service; her Glen Echo, Maryland, home is a National Historic Site.
Clara does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Clara reduce to 8, The Visionary. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.