Dora is from the Greek dōron ("gift") — historically a diminutive of Dorothy or Theodora. A top-50 US baby name from 1880 to 1899, peaking at #36 in 1882. Dora the Explorer — *Nickelodeon's groundbreaking bilingual English-Spanish animated series (2000-2014, 8 seasons); voiced by Kathleen Herles and later Caitlin Sanchez; one of the most-watched preschool series in US TV history and a major influence on Spanish-language exposure for English-speaking American children; spawned the Dora franchise including 2019 live-action film Dora and the Lost City of Gold with Isabela Merced. Dora Maar (1907-1997) — French photographer and painter; Pablo Picasso's lover and muse (1936-1945); subject of Picasso's Weeping Woman (1937) series — one of the most-recognized portraits in 20th-century art. Sigmund Freud's "Dora" — pseudonym for Ida Bauer (1882-1945) — the 18-year-old patient whose 1900-1901 case study Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905) became one of the foundational texts of psychoanalysis. Dora Akunyili (1954-2014) — Nigerian regulatory official; combatted counterfeit drugs as Director-General of NAFDAC. Dora in David Copperfield (1850)* — Charles Dickens.
Featured throughout 20th-century arts and American children's media.
Dora 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 Dora reduce to 2, The Peacemaker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.