Maya is a name with multiple parallel origins in different traditions. In Sanskrit, māyā (माया) means "illusion" — a key concept in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy referring to the appearances that veil ultimate reality. In Greek, Maia was the eldest of the Pleiades and the mother of Hermes. In Hebrew, Maya means "water." In Spanish, it can be a short form of Amalia.
Maya appeared in the U.S. top 100 in the late 1990s and has stayed there.
Maya 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 Maya reduce to 4, The Builder. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.