Braeden
- Pronunciation
- [Brae-den]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Dark Valley.
- Origin
- Celtic
About the Name Braeden
Braeden is a Celtic-origin name meaning dark valley, built from Gaelic elements that conjure a landscape of shadowed lowlands — an earthy, evocative origin that stands in slight contrast to the name's bright modern sound. It belongs to an extensive family of closely related spellings — Bradan, Braddon, Bradon, Braedon, Braiden, Brayden, and Braydon — all sharing the same Celtic topographic root. The ae digraph in Braeden gives it a slightly more archaic or Celtic visual character compared to the more phonetically familiar Brayden, even as the two are pronounced identically by most speakers.
In SSA records, Braeden first entered the male top-1000 in 2000 and peaked at #322 in 2005, accumulating 11,216 top-1000 births over its tracked span. It was part of the broad wave of Brayden-family names that defined early-2000s boys' naming, competing directly with multiple near-identical spellings for the same pool of parents. The name then declined steadily as the wave receded: #793 with 289 births in 2014, #797 with 293 births in 2015, and a final tracked appearance at #994 with 205 births in 2016.
The full variant set — Bradan, Braddon, Bradon, Braedon, Braiden, Brayden, and Braydon — illustrates just how fragmented this naming family became across the chart. Braeden's Celtic-leaning orthography gives it an identity slightly distinct from the dominant Brayden spelling, making it a reasonable choice for parents who want the familiar sound of the family but with a spelling that nods more clearly to its Gaelic origins.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Braeden
US Popularity History (2000–2016)
Annual US births named Braeden by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2005 with 1,004 boys named Braeden (boy rank #322 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2016, ranked #994 for boys (205 US births). That's 672 places below its 2005 peak.
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 Braeden Most Popular?
Average boy-name rank within each state across 2011–2020 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's boys-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Braeden the strongest states are Connecticut, Maryland, Wisconsin.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Connecticut | #400 | 31 |
| 2 | Maryland | #438 | 75 |
| 3 | Wisconsin | #439 | 50 |
| 4 | Massachusetts | #487 | 91 |
| 5 | Alabama | #521 | 31 |
| 6 | Colorado | #526 | 49 |
| 7 | Minnesota | #561 | 46 |
| 8 | Oregon | #565 | 18 |
| 9 | Washington | #586 | 61 |
| 10 | South Carolina | #586 | 37 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | #821 | 122 |
| 2 | Florida | #806 | 96 |
| 3 | New York | #748 | 115 |
| 4 | Texas | #729 | 130 |
| 5 | Georgia | #712 | 73 |
| 6 | North Carolina | #695 | 79 |
| 7 | Missouri | #695 | 27 |
| 8 | Tennessee | #692 | 48 |
| 9 | Ohio | #685 | 82 |
| 10 | Indiana | #681 | 40 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2011–2020. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Braeden in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bradan | From The Broad Valley | Male | English |
| Braddon | Broad Hillside. | Male | Irish |
| Bradon | Broad Hillside. | Male | English |
| Braedon | Broad Hillside. | Male | English |
| Braiden | Variation Of Braden: From The Broad Valley | Male | English |
| Brayden | Broad Hillside. | Male | English |
| Braydon | Broad Hillside. | Male | Irish |
Looking for names like Braeden?
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 Braeden to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Braeden against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).