Penelope comes from the Greek pēnē (πήνη), meaning the threads on a loom — "weaver." In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope is the wife of Odysseus, who waited twenty years for her husband's return while staving off 108 suitors with a cunning trick: she promised to choose a new husband when she finished weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law, and unwove her day's work every night.
Penelope has been used since antiquity as a symbol of faithfulness and patient intelligence. Its modern revival is striking — once considered impossibly old-fashioned, it climbed into the U.S.
Penelope 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 Penelope reduce to 7, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.