Zara has two parallel origins. In Arabic, Zara (زهرة, sometimes transliterated Zahra) means "flower" or "blooming." In Hebrew it is a variant of Sarah, meaning "princess." The two roots have braided over the centuries into one name that works comfortably across cultures.
Famous bearers include Princess Zara Tindall, granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II, who was given the name in 1981 — a deliberate cross-cultural choice that helped popularise it in the English-speaking world. The Spanish fashion retailer Zara, founded in 1975, has kept the name globally recognised in a different way.
Today Zara is a quietly cosmopolitan name.
Zara 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 Zara reduce to 1, The Leader. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.