Lena is the short form of Helena, Magdalena, or Elena — all from the Greek Helénē, meaning "sun's ray" or "bright." It is used as a standalone name across Europe.
Lena entered the U.S. top 1000 in 1880 and has been continuously used. Today it sits in the U.S. top 250 and is rising. The filmmaker Lena Dunham and the singer Lena Horne are notable American Lenas.
Lena 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 Lena reduce to 5, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.