Hayden
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Person from one of several English places called Hayden or Haydon, or from Irish Gaelic personal names meaning ‘little armour’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈheɪdən/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Hayden is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- IEIreland≈1 in 4.5K(inferred from the name graph)
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 6.4K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 7.6K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 462 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 4.5K (inferred from the name graph)
37,451 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Ireland, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Person from one of several English places called Hayden or Haydon, or from Irish Gaelic personal names meaning ‘little armour’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Hayden counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | #807 | 37,451 | 1 in 8.9K | 92K | Hayden | 462 |
| GB United Kingdom | #782 | ≈8,600 est. | ≈1 in 7.6K | 15 | Hayden | 213 |
| EG Egypt | — | ≈4,100 est. | ≈1 in 26K | — | Hayden | 6 |
| CA Canada | #957 | ≈4,000 est. | ≈1 in 9.5K | 46 | Hayden | 204 |
| IT Italy | — | ≈3,300 est. | ≈1 in 19K | — | Hayden | 22 |
| AU Australia | #909 | ≈2,900 est. | ≈1 in 8.9K | 97 | Hayden | 215 |
| IE Ireland | #415 | ≈1,200 est. | ≈1 in 4.5K | — | Hayden | 104 |
| NZ New Zealand | #644 | ≈770 est. | ≈1 in 6.4K | 20 | Hayden | 134 |
37,451 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; NRS — Baby names Scotland full list (1974–present); NSW BDM — Popular baby names (1952–present); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; DIA — Baby name popularity (1900–present). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Hayden is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, from Haydon (Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire), Haydon Bridge (Northumberland), or Heydon (Cambridgeshire, Norfolk); first attested Thomas de Haiden’ 1200 Pl (Ess)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
habitational name from any of various places called Hayden or Haydon. The three examples of Haydon in Northumberland are named from Old English heg ‘hay’ + denu ‘valley’. Others, for example in Dorset, Hertfordshire, Somerset, and Wiltshire, get the name from Old English heg ‘hay’ (or perhaps hege ‘hedge’ or (ge)hceg ‘enclosure’) -l- dun ‘hill’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
reduced form of O’Hayden, an Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 hEideain and 6 hEidi'n ‘descendant of Eidedn' or ‘descendant of Eidm\ personal names apparently from a diminutive of eideadh ‘clothes’, ‘armor’. There was also a Norman family bearing the English name (see 2 below), living in County Wexford.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, A habitational surname from Old English.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In German, ) Haydon; Haden [’heidan]: in den USA und AustraHen geläufiger männl.
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Ferdinand Vandeveer Haydenb. 1829USU.S geologist and surgeon (1829-1887)
- Carl Haydenb. 1877USDemocratic U.S. Senator from Arizona
- Sterling Haydenb. 1916USAmerican actor (1916–1986)
- Bill Haydenb. 1933AUformer Governor-General of Australia from 1989 to 1996
- Tom Haydenb. 1939USAmerican activist (1939–2016)
- Carla Haydenb. 1952USAmerican librarian and 14th Librarian of Congress (born 1952)
- Dennis Haydenb. 1952USAmerican actor
- Pamela Haydenb. 1953USAmerican actress
- Nicky Haydenb. 1981USAmerican motorcycle racer (1981-2017)
- Brent Haydenb. 1983CACanadian swimmer, Olympic bronze medallist, world champion, former world record-holder
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 85 sources across 44 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 37K | #930 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 36K | #878 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 36K | #959 |
Reference works 8
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- Ethiopian name tokens (GitHub lehagere/ethiopian-names, 40/60 condominium list)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Hayden mean, and where does it come from?
- Person from one of several English places called Hayden or Haydon, or from Irish Gaelic personal names meaning ‘little armour’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Hayden have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 37 thousand people named Hayden, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled hayden.
- How common is the name Hayden?
- In the United States, the national register counted 37,451 people named Hayden in 2010, about 1 in 8.9 thousand residents.
- How common is Hayden compared with other names?
- In the United States, Hayden is the 807th most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
- How do you pronounce Hayden?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈheɪdən/ (IPA) for English.
What do you want to know about Hayden?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/haydenThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Hayden” — the 807th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.