Variant of Peyton, from an English surname meaning Peca's settlement or town.
Peighton is a contemporary phonetic reimagining of Peyton (also spelled Payton), itself rooted in an Old English surname derived from a place name meaning roughly "Pæga's settlement" or "estate of the fighting man." The place-name origin connects it to the sweeping tradition of English topographic surnames that migrated into given-name use during the 19th century, when surnames-as-first-names became fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic. The name gained particular cultural momentum in the United States through football — most visibly Peyton Manning, the Hall of Fame quarterback, and Walter Payton, the legendary Chicago Bears running back for whom the NFL's Man of the Year Award is named.
These associations gave the name an athletic, all-American resonance that made it popular for both boys and girls through the 1990s and 2000s. Television also played a role: the character Peyton Sawyer on "One Tree Hill" cemented it as a name with a certain brooding, creative cool. The Peighton spelling is a distinctly modern invention — part of a broader late-20th and early-21st century trend of using unexpected letter combinations to individualize familiar sounds, particularly by substituting "eigh" for the long-A sound.
Parents choosing this spelling often seek to balance familiarity (the name sounds immediately recognizable) with visual distinctiveness. It sits comfortably in the American tradition of creative orthographic variation, alongside names like Jaiden, Braylee, and Jaxon.