Jade is the English name for the green ornamental mineral (nephrite or jadeite), prized for over five thousand years in China for its beauty and association with virtue, longevity, and protection. The English word comes from the Spanish piedra de la ijada — "stone of the side," so named because it was believed to cure pains of the kidneys.
Jade as a given name is a modern phenomenon, entering English usage in the 1970s. It now sits in the U.S. top 130 and is consistently in the top 50 in France, where the spelling is the same. Short, sharp, and with a meaning everyone knows.
Jade 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 Jade reduce to 2, The Peacemaker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.