Penny is the diminutive of Penelope — from the Greek Penelópē, meaning "weaver." In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope is Odysseus's faithful wife.
Penny entered the U.S. Today Penny sits in the U.S. top 350 and is rising as part of the broader return of vintage diminutives.
Penny 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 Penny reduce to 2, The Peacemaker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.