Phaedra (Φαίδρα) comes from the Greek phaidros, meaning "bright" or "radiant." In Greek mythology, Phaedra is the tragic queen of Athens who falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus — the subject of Euripides's tragedy.
Phaedra is rare as a given name but rising in literary families.
Phaedra 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 Phaedra reduce to 8, The Visionary. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.