Ellen is the medieval English form of Helen — from the Greek helene (torch).
Author of This Child Will Be Great (2009).
Ellen 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 Ellen reduce to 3, The Communicator. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.