Jane is the English feminine of John — both names from the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning "God is gracious." Jane developed in medieval England as the feminine version of John, alongside Joan and Joanna.
Jane has been continuously used in English for over five hundred years. Three queens of England, novelist Jane Austen, primatologist Jane Goodall, and the heroine of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre have all carried the name. Today it sits in the U.S. top 300 — quiet, classic, never overused.
Jane 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 Jane reduce to 3, The Communicator. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.