Lavender is from the Latin lavare ("to wash") — Romans bathed in lavender-scented water. *The fragrant Mediterranean shrub Lavandula used since antiquity in perfume, medicine, and culinary art. Lavender also denotes a pale purple color and, since the late 19th century, has been a symbol of lesbian and gay identity — Sappho was associated with violets, and "lavender" became coded slang in 19th-century America. Lavender Brown is a character in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (Ron Weasley's girlfriend in Half-Blood Prince, 2005). Roald Dahl's Matilda (1988) features a character named Lavender*.
Featured throughout the Victorian botanical name fashion and the 1990s revival of nature names.
Lavender 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 Lavender reduce to 9, The Giver. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.