Fatima comes from the Arabic root f-ṭ-m, meaning "to wean." The name has been carried by Fatima al-Zahra, the youngest daughter of the Prophet Muhammad and wife of Ali — one of the most revered women in Islamic history and a central figure in Shia Islam.
It is one of the most widely used names in the world: common in Muslim-majority countries from Morocco to Indonesia, used across Catholic Latin America, and increasingly chosen in Europe and North America.
Fatima 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 Fatima reduce to 5, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.