Thora is from the Old Norse Þóra — the feminine form of Thor (god of thunder, lightning, and storms) — "of Thor." Thora Birch (born 1982) — *American actress; child star turned adult lead; played Jane Burnham in Sam Mendes's American Beauty (1999), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture; Enid Coleslaw in Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World (2001) — won the Golden Globe nomination and the Independent Spirit Award. Earlier child roles include Patriot Games (1992), Hocus Pocus (1993) as Dani Dennison, Now and Then (1995), and Alaska (1996). Returned to television in The Walking Dead (2018) as Gamma; The Gabby Petito Story (2024) on Lifetime. Thora Hird (1911-2003) — English actress; BAFTA TV Award for Talking Heads (1988) and Lost for Words* (1999); DBE. Thora Borg Hallgrímsdóttir — Icelandic athlete. Thóra Kristín Þórsdóttir — Icelandic actress. Thóra Magnúsdóttir — Icelandic snowboarder. Thor — Marvel Cinematic Universe character (played by Chris Hemsworth) and Norse god — son of Odin and Frigg, husband of Sif.
Featured throughout 1990s-2020s American cinema.
Thora 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 Thora reduce to 8, The Visionary. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.