Opal comes from the Sanskrit upala, meaning "precious stone" — the iridescent gem that shifts colour with the light. October's birthstone.
Opal peaked in the U.S. at #81 in 1911 and faded. It is returning rapidly in the 2020s as part of the broader return of gem names. Today it sits in the U.S. top 500 and is climbing fast.
Opal 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 Opal reduce to 8, The Visionary. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.