Nora has two parallel origins. In Irish, it is a short form of Honora, from the Latin honor, meaning "honour" or "dignity." In Italian and Spanish, Nora is a short form of Eleanora — from the same root that gives Eleanor, meaning "shining light."
Today Nora sits in the U.S.
Nora 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 Nora reduce to 3, The Communicator. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.