Prudence is from the Latin prudentia ("foresight, wisdom") — one of the four classical cardinal virtues alongside Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. A Puritan virtue name popular in 17th-century England and colonial New England. Saint Prudence of Como (5th c.) was an early Italian martyr. Prudence Crandall (1803-1890) — American schoolteacher who in 1832 opened the first private school for Black women in the United States (in Canterbury, Connecticut), defying mob violence; declared Connecticut's state heroine in 1995. *Featured in the Beatles song Dear Prudence (1968), written by John Lennon for Mia Farrow's sister Prudence Farrow* during the band's stay at an Indian ashram.
Subject of Susan Strane's A Whole-Souled Woman: Prudence Crandall and the Education of Black Women (1990).
Prudence 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 Prudence reduce to 5, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.