Asha has two parallel origins. In Sanskrit, āśā (आशा) means "hope" or "wish." In Swahili, Asha (also Aisha) means "life" — borrowed from the Arabic root ʿ-y-sh through centuries of trade contact between East Africa and the Arab world.
The convergence is beautiful — hope in Sanskrit, life in Swahili. Asha is common in India, in East Africa, and increasingly in Western countries that draw from both traditions. It sits in the U.S. top 800 and is rising.
Asha 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.
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In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Asha reduce to 2, The Peacemaker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.