Samantha is generally believed to be a feminine elaboration of Samuel — from the Hebrew Shemu'el, meaning "told by God" or "name of God." The Greek suffix -antha (meaning "flower") may also have influenced its construction in 18th-century America.
Samantha rose dramatically in the 1960s with the TV series Bewitched, whose witch heroine was named Samantha Stephens. It peaked at #4 in 1991 and has remained continuously in the U.S. top 50 since. Today it sits at #43.
Samantha is a compound name. Its parts are ánthos — each an attested element with a recorded meaning of its own.
Samantha 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 Samantha reduce to 5, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.