Olwen comes from the Welsh ôl (track, footprint) and gwen (white, blessed) — meaning "white footprint." In the Welsh Mabinogi, Olwen is the heroine whose white flowers spring from her footsteps wherever she walks.
Olwen is widely used in Wales.
Olwen 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 Olwen reduce to 6, The Nurturer. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.