Leighton
- Pronunciation
- [Leig-hton]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- From The Meadow Farm
- Origin
- English
About the Name Leighton
Leighton is an English place-name surname turned given name, meaning "from the meadow farm" — built from Old English roots describing a settlement set among grazing land. Like many such names, it began life as a marker of where a family lived before it ever became a personal name, and it carries with it a pastoral, settled-in-the-countryside feel, full of meadows, hedgerows, and open fields.
The fashionable -ton ending places it among a popular group of surname-style names that read as polished and contemporary, while the softer Leigh- spelling lends it an extra touch of grace. The result feels both grounded and stylish, equally at home as a modern first name for a boy and carrying just enough refinement to stand apart from plainer alternatives. It reads as confident, current, and quietly distinguished, the sort of name that sounds equally at ease in a classroom and a boardroom.
As a boys' name, Leighton first entered the US Social Security top-1000 in 2010 and reached its peak in 2019 at #692. It remained in the rankings through 2023, when it sat at #968, and across its tracked years it accounted for 3,217 births among the top-1000. The recorded variant Layton offers a more straightforwardly phonetic spelling of the same sound, giving parents a choice between the elegant and the plainspoken.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Leighton
US Popularity History (2009–2025)
Annual US births named Leighton by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2025 with 892 girls named Leighton (girl rank #342 that year).
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Where in the US Is Leighton Most Popular?
Average girl-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's girls-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Leighton the strongest states are Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Montana | #169 | 32 |
| 2 | South Dakota | #183 | 39 |
| 3 | Nebraska | #196 | 119 |
| 4 | Maine | #210 | 28 |
| 5 | Oklahoma | #210 | 188 |
| 6 | New Hampshire | #231 | 17 |
| 7 | Iowa | #243 | 136 |
| 8 | Arkansas | #243 | 120 |
| 9 | West Virginia | #264 | 49 |
| 10 | Kentucky | #268 | 164 |
Weakest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New York | #784 | 167 |
| 2 | California | #771 | 389 |
| 3 | New Jersey | #756 | 56 |
| 4 | Utah | #665 | 30 |
| 5 | Massachusetts | #640 | 79 |
| 6 | Maryland | #608 | 87 |
| 7 | Washington | #560 | 117 |
| 8 | Oregon | #547 | 59 |
| 9 | Pennsylvania | #536 | 195 |
| 10 | Florida | #517 | 322 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Leighton in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Layton | From The Meadow Farm | Male | English |
Looking for names like Leighton?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Leighton to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Leighton against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).