Elena is the Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Romanian form of Helen — from the Greek Helénē (Ἑλένη), meaning "sun's ray" or "bright." The same root gives Eleanor, Ellen, Helene, and Yelena.
Elena is enormously popular across Italy, Spain, Russia, and Latin America. In the U.S. it sits at #97 and has been climbing fast in the 2020s.
Elena 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 Elena reduce to 1, The Leader. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.