English surname used as a given name meaning 'from the white settlement,' also linked to the German city Witten.
Witten arrives at the intersection of Old English heritage and modern surname-naming culture. In Old English, witta meant a "wise man," "counselor," or "sage" — one of the "witan," the council of advisors to Anglo-Saxon kings whose collective wisdom formed the Witenagemot, the precursor to parliamentary government. A name descended from that root carries the quiet implication of thoughtfulness and governance, of someone whose role is to advise and discern.
As a surname, Witten appears most prominently in the form of Edward Witten, the American theoretical physicist regarded as one of the greatest minds in modern mathematics and physics. His work on string theory, M-theory, and topological quantum field theory earned him a Fields Medal in 1990 — the only physicist ever to receive mathematics' highest honor. That association lends the name a quietly extraordinary intellectual pedigree, connecting it to the frontier where mathematics and physics blur into philosophy.
There is also a Witten in Germany's Ruhr Valley — an industrial city whose name derives from Old Low German roots related to "willow" or possibly to a personal name. The convergence of these references — Anglo-Saxon wisdom councils, a living scientific genius, a European city with deep industrial history — gives Witten an unlikely richness for a name that sounds so clean and modern. As a given name it is rare, which suits it; it is the kind of name a parent chooses not because it is trending but because they found it somewhere specific and decided it was worth carrying forward.