A variant of Madison, from an English surname meaning son of Maud.
Madisen is a variant spelling of Madison, a surname-turned-given-name with an unlikely origin story. Madison began as an English patronymic meaning son of Maud or son of Matthew, Maud itself being a medieval Norman contraction of Mathilda (from Germanic maht, power, and hild, battle). For centuries it belonged exclusively to family names and American geography — most famously to President James Madison and the New York avenue named in his honor.
The tipping point came in 1984 with the release of the romantic comedy Splash, in which Daryl Hannah played a mermaid who chose Madison as her human name after seeing a street sign. The film turned Madison into a given name phenomenon almost overnight, particularly for girls. By the 1990s it had entered the top ten in the United States, an extraordinary ascent for a word that had never functioned as a female first name before.
Madisen, Madisyn, and Madyson emerged as phonetic respellings as parents sought individuality within the trend. The -en ending in Madisen gives the name a slightly softer cadence and visually distinguishes it from the more common Madison while sounding identical in speech. It sits within a broader American naming tradition of respelling popular names to create a sense of uniqueness — a form of customization that became especially prevalent in the 1990s and 2000s. Today Madisen reads as a confident, contemporary name with a playful relationship to its own unusual history.