Madison · Daily fortune

Madison is an English surname turned given name, now overwhelmingly feminine. Behind the Name glosses the surname as "son of Matthew" or "son of Maud"; Wikipedia calls it a variant of Mathieson and offers "son of Maddy", Maddy being short for Maud. It was not commonly used for girls until the 1984 film Splash, in which the main character takes the name from a Madison Avenue street sign. By 2001 it ranked second among American girls' names — a rise Behind the Name calls an unprecedented 550,000 percent increase in usage. It ranked #40 in 2025.

Behind the Name gives Madison as "from the English surname Madison meaning 'son of Matthew' or 'son of Maud'". Wikipedia agrees on both possibilities, describing the name as a variant of Mathieson, "meaning son of Matthew", and adding that it may instead derive from "son of Maddy", where Maddy is a short form of Maud; it places the surname's origin in England. Behind the Name's own root links point at its entries for Matthew and Maud. Of those two, only the Matthew entry was in the cached set consulted here — it gives Matthew as the English form of Greek Matthaios, from Mattithiah — so the Maud side of the derivation is recorded but its own etymology is not verified in this pass. Because the sources offer two parents rather than one, confidence is marked likely rather than established.

Madison begins as an English patronymic surname. Its most famous surname bearer, noted by Behind the Name, is James Madison (1751–1836), one of the authors of the American constitution and later president — and the man after whom Madison Avenue was named. That street is the hinge of the name's history. Behind the Name records that Madison was not commonly used as a feminine name until the 1984 film Splash, in which the main character adopts it after seeing a street sign for Madison Avenue in New York City, and that it was ranked second for girls in the United States by 2001: "this rise from obscurity to prominence in only 18 years represents an unprecedented 550,000 percent increase in usage". Wikipedia attributes the rise to the same film, notes the decline since — 46th in 2024 — and adds that masculine use was never common and remains sporadic.

Madison ranked #40 for girls in the United States in 2025 (Social Security Administration), a long way below the #2 placement both sources record for 2001. Wikipedia puts the name at 46th in the US in 2024 and 41st in Canada in 2022, so the 2025 figure reads as a flattening rather than a continued slide. Wikipedia also records that masculine use has always been uncommon and appears in the top 1,000 boys' names only sporadically; the 2025 SSA data supplied for this profile lists Madison among girls only.

Madison is an English name and Behind the Name lists no "Other Languages & Cultures" forms for it — only English spelling variants and diminutives. The pronunciation below is the one Behind the Name gives.

Madison is the definitive American surname-name for girls, and it wears its decade openly: a child named Madison reads as born between about 1995 and 2010 to most American ears, in the way that Jennifer reads as the 1970s. Its structure is still appealing — three syllables, a soft opening, a surname's neutrality, and an unusually warm set of short forms in Maddie and Madi. What it no longer has is surprise. Parents drawn to the sound but not the cohort tend to move sideways to Adeline, Marlowe or Emerson, or to use Maddie from a different full name.

The bearers below are limited to those named in the two sources consulted for this profile: the Behind the Name entry and the Wikipedia article on the name.

Names that share Madison's surname construction, its nickname, or its sound.