Hazel is the English name for the tree (Corylus avellana) and its nuts. The hazel was associated in Celtic folklore with wisdom — eating hazelnuts, in some myths, conferred poetic inspiration. The colour hazel (the warm brown of eyes that are neither brown nor green) takes its name from the same tree.
Like Violet and Rose, Hazel was a Victorian-era botanical name that vanished in the mid-twentieth century and has returned dramatically in the 2010s. Today it sits in the U.S.
Hazel 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 Hazel reduce to 7, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.