A variant of Layton or Leighton, from an English place name meaning 'settlement with a leek garden' or 'meadow town.'
Layten is a phonetic variant of Layton or Leighton, an English place name of Old English origin meaning "leek enclosure" or "herb garden settlement" — from "leac" (leek, or more broadly, a cultivated herb plot) and "tun" (an enclosed farm or settlement). Place names like this were common in medieval England, where towns and villages were named for their agricultural character, and they subsequently became hereditary surnames as the feudal system required stable family identifiers. Leighton remains a village name in several English counties.
The surname Leighton was borne by a number of notable figures, including the Victorian painter Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, one of the leading academic painters of 19th-century Britain whose work hung at the Royal Academy and who became the first visual artist to be elevated to the peerage. As a given name, Leighton (and its variants Layton and Layten) entered broader use in the 20th century, following the well-worn path of English surnames crossing over to first-name status. The actress Leighton Meester — best known as Blair Waldorf in "Gossip Girl" — gave the name significant cultural visibility in the 2000s.
Layten specifically signals parental creativity with spelling, softening the name with an "ay" vowel that feels more phonetically intuitive for American English readers. It sits comfortably in the Southern and Midwestern naming traditions where creative respellings of classic surname-names are particularly popular, carrying a sense of heritage and rootedness without feeling stiff or formal.