Iona is the name of a small Scottish island in the Inner Hebrides — one of the most important early Christian sites in Britain, where Saint Columba founded a monastery in 563 CE that became the source of much Celtic Christian art and the Book of Kells.
The etymology of the island name is debated — possibly from Old Norse "island of the yew tree" or older Gaelic. Iona as a girls' name is rising in the Scottish-influenced English-speaking world.
Iona 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.
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In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Iona reduce to 3, The Communicator. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.