A surname-style form meaning 'son of Anders/Andrew,' ultimately from Greek for 'manly' or 'brave.'
Andersen is a Scandinavian patronymic surname meaning 'son of Anders,' where Anders is the Danish and Norwegian form of Andrew — from the Greek Andreas, derived from 'aner' (genitive 'andros'), meaning 'man' in the sense of courage, strength, and virility. Andrew was the name of the first apostle called by Jesus in the Gospel of John, and the name spread across Europe on the strength of his veneration, producing Andrew in English, André in French, Andreas in German and Greek, and Anders in the Nordic countries. The patronymic '-sen' suffix (equivalent to the Swedish '-son' and English '-son') was the standard mechanism of Scandinavian naming for centuries.
The name Andersen carries an inescapable association with one of the most consequential storytellers in world literary history: Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish author born in Odense in 1805, whose fairy tales — 'The Little Mermaid,' 'Thumbelina,' 'The Ugly Duckling,' 'The Snow Queen,' 'The Emperor's New Clothes' — shaped global childhood imagination across two centuries. His stories were revolutionary in that he composed original narratives rather than collecting folk tales, investing them with personal longing, social observation, and a melancholy that distinguishes them from simpler moral fables. His life was as remarkable as his work: the son of a cobbler who rose to international literary celebrity.
As a given name, Andersen is rare and genuinely distinctive — a surname used as a first name that immediately evokes both Nordic heritage and the enchanted world of fairy tales. It is a name with a literary inheritance of extraordinary richness.