Forrest is the elaborate spelling of Forest — from the Old French forest (wooded area). Forrest Gump — central character of Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump (1994), played by Tom Hanks; the film won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Hanks's second consecutive Best Actor Oscar after Philadelphia), and Best Adapted Screenplay; grossed $678 million worldwide on a $55 million budget — the highest-grossing film of 1994; the phrase "Life is like a box of chocolates" was voted #40 on AFI's 100 Greatest Movie Quotes; the film was inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress (2011). General Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877) — male; American Confederate general; first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan; remains a controversial figure in American history.
Forrest 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 Forrest reduce to 2, The Peacemaker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.