The baby name Laken blends surname style with the appeal of nature names.
Thanks to Min for suggesting our Baby Name of the Day.
WHAT DOES THE NAME LAKEN MEAN?
Long before Laken was a given name, Laeken appeared on the map.
The town includes Laeken Palace, home to the royal family of the Belgians. Laeken started out as a suburb of Brussels, the capital city of Belgium. Today it’s part of the larger metropolitan area.
The current King of the Belgians is Philippe; his eldest daughter, Elisabeth, is his heir. They call the palace home, though there’s a separate Royal Palace of Brussels in the city center for official business.
They’re low-profile compared to other European royals.
Back to Laeken: it literally means lake, ultimately from the Latin word lacus. The place name has been in use for centuries, dating to at least the 1200s.
It’s also sometimes spelled Laken.
Despite the possible connection between a place name the baby name Laken, it’s not clear that Belgium is part of the story at all.
Instead, we have to look to California.
SOAP OPERA NAME
Laken became a given name thanks to the soap opera Santa Barbara.
In July 1984, the show introduced Laken Lockridge. She was one of the first teenage characters introduced to show, and would be part of the cast, on and off, through 1991.
Soap operas fueled naming innovation in the second half of the 20th century, and television is still a powerful force. But the name Laken arrived at the right moment. We were already naming our daughter Megan, Lauren, Kristen/Kristin, and Allison. Laken fit right in.
GENDER NEUTRAL POSSIBILITY
The baby name Lake is also used sometimes. Like River and Ocean it’s a boy’s name and girl’s name alike.
Laken fits this pattern, too.
Several similar last names could also be an influence. There’s Lakin, often from the Jewish Leykin/Leyke, ultimately from the given name Lea/Leah. Place name Lakin, Lacon, or Lakene was sometimes used in England.
Like Larken, it might even come from Lawrence as a diminutive form.
As a first or middle name, Laken might honor a family name – which makes it equally wearable for a daughter or a son.
HOW POPULAR IS THE NAME LAKEN?
19 girls were given the name in 1984, the year Laken Lockridge debuted on the small screen. From 1990 through 1995, the baby name Laken ranked in the girls’ Top 1000 in the US.
As of 2025, Laken has returned to the girls’ list. It stands at #990.
In addition, there are:
- Lakyn – given to 144 girls and 17 boys
- Laikyn – given to 118 girls and fewer than 6 boys
- Layken – given to 74 girls and 20 boys
- Laiken – given to 71 girls and 25 boys
- Laykin – given to 20 girls and fewer than 5 boys
- Laekyn – given to 5 girls and fewer than 5 boys
There are other possibilities, too. McKinli, the blogger at Mommy’s Little Sunshine, has a daughter called Laikynn, which was given to 9 girls and fewer than 5 boys in 2025. She went viral, years ago, for a photo showing her favorite girls’ names on a chalkboard.
It’s growing as both a girls and boys name, though some spellings – and the overall tally – clearly favor girls.
In 2015, Laken Tomlinson was drafted by the Detroit Lions, and played over a decade in the NFL.
RISING NATURE PLUS NAMES
The baby name Laken is a little bit of a synthetic surname. Like Ryder, it does exist, but parents are probably drawn to it for sound and style, not as a heritage choice.
But it’s also part of a new trend: Nature Plus names. It’s a mix and match approach to naming, a little bit like Kaylee, Ryleigh, and Ayden, but this time with one element drawn from the natural world: Oakleigh, Lakelynn, and Bearett, for example.
If you’re torn between a surname name like Merritt and a nature-inspired choice like River, Laken might the perfect name compromise.
With an appealing sound and a longer-than-you-might-guess history of use, Laken might follow names like Briar and Skyla up the popularity charts.
What do you think of the baby name Laken?
First published on March 3, 2016, this post was revised on May 13, 2026.
We have a Laken (son) born 2020 and people we know just named there son Laiken born 2021. Both in Tasmania Australia
I am a Laken. My mom got the name from watching the soap opera credits one day in 1986. I’m female so naturally I only associate it with females. I’ve met a male Larkin but never a Laken.
My son is 9. Born in 2007. It is spelled Laken. I like that it simply means “of the lake.” One of the reasons I chose it is because it didn’t have any religious meaning and I wanted something completely different. To this day we have never met another Laken and we live in the suburbs of a large city.
We just welcomed a little girl in January named Lakeyn! We chose her spelling because my name has a similar -eyn ending. All of our family and friends have began to call her by the nickname Lake. ๐
We are expecting our third child this month and Lakin is one of our top choices for a girl. I like this spelling as I’ve seen it as a surname (actress Christine Lakin) but i am a little hesitant because like you stated I too like names with real meaning and roots.
It may be corny and cheesy bit this baby was conceived by a Lake so I think that’s one of the main reasons I like it.
I’ve seen Lakynn most locally.
I like it better on a boy, myself. For a girl, I’d drop the N and just use Lake.
Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be any Dutch cities named this, so my etymological dictionary of the place names of the Nethelands provides no clue to origin…
Based on the postal code, it looks like it’s officially part of Brussels … I took your tip and tried Google book searching it, hoping there would be something from the 19th century, but zip, zilch, nada … So either the Santa Barbara writers pulled it out of think air, or one of them had just returned from a visit to Belgium … both seem equally likely!
Sorry to necro this, but I couldn’t not let you know. Did some research for you, found it pretty quickly. Reading Dutch helps, as do Latin, German and French. The town is first mentioned in 1081 (1) in Marianus Scottus, Chronikon (MGH SS V 562) (2). That text speaks of a Heinricus of Lacha (3), which is identified as Laken (Dutch), a.k.a. Laeken (French), and identifies Hermann of Salm (4) as his nephew or uncle (my Latin is rusty). A connection to Dutch “laken” (noun: cloth) cannot be demonstrated, but is possible. Etymologically this connection is unlikely, since Lacha is attested centuries before laken, and because that ch sound is not found in the earliest attestations of laken. Another possible connection is to medieval Latin “lacha”, which is apparently attested only once (5) and supposedly meant lacquer. Most likely in my view is that it is descended from proto-Germanic *lakล, from which lake is the English descendant, but more significantly laak (pond) is an archaic Dutch descendant and Lache (puddle) is a German descendant. The old-Dutch reconstruction is *laka, which very well may have had a regional variation with a ch-sound in it (pronounced somewhat like a kh-sound in English).
All in all, if the name is in any way connected to Laeken, Belgium (which I did not check), there is likely still a link to the word lake.
1 1080 according to Wikipedia, but I was not able to verify that. It could be here, but I have no access to that source: Ameeuw, Bruxelles au fil des jours et des saisons, LASNE, รdition de l’ARC, 1996, 30e รฉd., p. 404
2 https://www.dmgh.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb00000872_00574.html?sortIndex=010%3A050%3A0005%3A010%3A00%3A00
3 possibly this man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_of_Laach
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_of_Salm
5 https://ducange.enc.sorbonne.fr/lacha