An English surname-based name from a place meaning something like 'farm or settlement in a valley or slate area.'
Slayton is an English surname-turned-given-name with roots in Old English topography. It likely derives from a place name meaning either 'settlement among the sloe trees' — the sloe being the small, bitter fruit of the blackthorn bush — or 'flat farmstead,' from the Old English 'slaegt' combined with 'tun,' the ubiquitous Old English word for an enclosure, estate, or settlement. As with many English place-derived surnames, Slayton traveled as a family name to North America with early settlers and has periodically been pressed into service as a given name, particularly in the American South and Midwest where surname-as-firstname traditions run deep.
The name received its most famous association through Deke Slayton — Donald Kent Slayton — one of NASA's original Mercury Seven astronauts, selected in 1959 as among the first American men chosen to go to space. Slayton was grounded for years by a heart condition and became instead NASA's director of flight crew operations, the man who assigned astronauts to missions and shaped the human side of the entire Apollo program. He finally flew in 1975, on the Apollo-Soyuz mission, becoming the oldest American to reach space at that time.
His story of patient perseverance gave the name Slayton a particular American mythology: competence rewarded, patience vindicated, the long game won. As a given name today, Slayton occupies the family of rugged, surname-style masculine names — alongside Sutton, Dayton, and Clayton — that have found renewed favor among parents seeking names with frontier texture and American specificity. It is uncommon enough to stand out while familiar enough in sound to need no explanation.