Layden is an English-style surname name, likely related to place names meaning path, lane, or settlement.
Layden is a modern phonetic variant of the name cluster that includes Layton, Leighton, and Leiden — names with roots in Old English place-naming traditions. Leighton comes from lēah ("woodland clearing") and tun ("settlement, enclosure"), meaning roughly "the settlement by the meadow." Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire and various English villages of that name gave rise to the surname, which crossed into given-name use in the twentieth century riding the wave of surname-as-first-name fashion.
The Dutch city of Leiden (also spelled Leyden) offers a different but equally interesting angle: it is famous as the home of one of Europe's oldest universities (founded 1575) and as the birthplace of Rembrandt. The Leyden jar — the world's first electrical capacitor, invented there in the 1740s — gave the city a particular place in the history of science. While Layden as a given name is unlikely to be consciously evoking this, the association lends it an accidental intellectual pedigree.
In contemporary American naming, Layden belongs to the "ayd" and "aden" phoneme family — Aiden, Jayden, Cayden, Brayden — that dominated the 2000s and 2010s, but its unusual "L" opening and the "ay" spelling give it a slightly more distinctive profile within that group. It projects a modern, energetic masculinity while remaining gentle enough to feel approachable.