Zoe comes from the Greek zōē (ζωή), meaning "life." Early Greek-speaking Jews used Zoe as a translation of Eve (the Hebrew Chavah, also meaning "life"). Several early Christian saints bore the name.
Zoe has been used in Greek for over two thousand years. In the West it entered widespread use in the 1990s and has been steadily rising. The umlaut spelling Zoë is the original Greek with the diaeresis to mark the two-syllable pronunciation.
Zoe 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 Zoe reduce to 1, The Leader. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.