The harp was a noble instrument in Celtic and Anglo-Saxon culture, associated with poets, courts, and bardic traditions, so the harper held a respected place in the community.
Its current popularity is a 2010s phenomenon: David and Victoria Beckham named their daughter Harper Seven in 2011, and the name became one of the fastest-rising girl names of the decade.
Harper 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 Harper reduce to 3, The Communicator. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.