Yael (יָעֵל) is the Hebrew name for the ibex — the wild mountain goat of the Levant and Middle East, known for its agility on impossibly steep cliffs. In the Book of Judges, Yael is the heroine who defeated the enemy general Sisera.
Yael is among the most popular girl names in Israel. It is rising in Western use, particularly in Jewish families. The Hebrew sound is two syllables; the English approximation is sometimes "yah-ELL."
Yael 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 Yael reduce to 7, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.