Viola is the Latin word for "violet" — the small purple flower.
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (c. The actress Viola Davis (born 1965), one of the most acclaimed of her generation, has brought the name fresh contemporary visibility.
Viola 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 Viola reduce to 5, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.