Kadon
Masculine
Kadon takes its ending from a real English word, and the respelling has quietly destroyed a distinction. In English place names -don is from dūn, a hill, and -den is from denu, a valley. They are opposites. Modern name-making treats them as interchangeable spellings of the same schwa.
How old is the name Kadon?
Kadon first appears in US birth records in 1995 — 30 years ago. The typical Kadon alive today was born around 2008, making them about 17 years old. About 700 people named Kadon are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Kadon most popular?
Kadon peaked in 2005, reaching #2206 nationally. Today it ranks #7194, 4,988 places below that high. See the whole 2005 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From dūn to Kadon
Our story of Kadon
English place names encode landscape with real precision. A -don is a hill: Snowdon, Huntingdon, Croydon. A -den is a valley: Marsden, Debden, Hazelden. A -ton is a farmstead, a -ley a clearing, a -ford a river crossing. Every one of those endings arrived in modern American naming through surnames, and in the process they stopped meaning anything, because the vowel in an unstressed final syllable is a schwa in all of them. Landon and Camden are pronounced with the same second syllable, so a family choosing between -don and -den is choosing a look, not a landscape. Kadon sits at the end of that process: a made prefix plus an ending that once said hill, in a name where the hill has been fully erased. It is a small demonstration of how quickly a meaningful morpheme becomes a decorative one.
Meaningnot established
Not established
No inherited meaning. Ka- is a created prefix; -don is borrowed from the ending of surname names such as Landon, Braydon and Camden. The historical -don element does mean hill, from Old English dūn, but that meaning belongs to the place names it came from and does not transfer to a name built from the fragment. Kadon has no documented source and no established reading.
How the name formed
- dūn
- -don
- Kadon
Related forms: Kaden · Caden
Pronouncing Kadon
KAY-dun
Two syllables, stress on the first, with the second reduced to a schwa. Some families say KAH-don with a full second vowel to distinguish it from Kaden; both are in use.
Nicknames for Kadon
Moderate
What the data says
146 years of official birth records
The long climb, and where it stands now
The same years in position rather than babies
- First recorded
- 1995
- Most boys named
- 200554 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #2206reached in 2005
- Change vs 2024
- +120.0%11 in 2025, from 5
Rank is a position, a count is a headcount, and they move independently — a name can hold its rank while the number of babies behind it falls. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration.
Kadon in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Kaden in English — spelling variant
- Caden in English — spelling variant
Kadons among us
people named Kadon are estimated to be alive in the US today
About 1 boy in 155,280 born in 2025 was named Kadon
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Is it right for you
What happens to a name after it peaks
The Thaddaeus test
Every popular name lives one long story — a climb, a peak, a slow settling back. Kadon's later chapters haven't been written yet, so we borrowed them: Thaddaeus climbed just as high around 1978, and its whole arc is on record. Line the two peaks up, and Thaddaeus's path sketches the road Kadon is walking now.
Kadon sits in the calm middle of the cycle — neither chasing a wave nor sliding off one. Middle-of-the-cycle names age slowly and predictably.
A scored estimate from 146 years of naming cycles — not a prophecy. Great names outlive statistics. How this is scored
Kadon beside its neighbors
The names ranked closest to Kadon in 2025, in babies rather than position — the bars are to scale.
US boys given each name in 2025.
The trade-off
- It sits inside a very large, familiar sound family, so it is never hard to say.
- Kade is a clean, current short form.
- The K spelling is visually distinct from the more common Caden.
- Kaden, Caden, Cayden and Kaiden are all more common and will be substituted.
- There is no meaning attached to the name as a whole.
- The sound is closely dated to the 2000s.
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Kadon
Masculine · #7194 in the U.S.
Frequently asked
- How many Kadons are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 700 people named Kadon are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Kadon in 2025?
- Kadon ranks #7194 among US boy names in 2025, with 11 babies given the name.
- How rare is the name Kadon?
- About 1 in every 155,280 US boys born in 2025 was named Kadon — 11 in all.
- Will my child share the name Kadon with classmates?
- Kadon will almost certainly be the only one in school.
Ranked beside Kadon
Names sitting at a similar level of popularity right now.
Junius#7194 · Orie#7194 · Shade#7194 · Chesley#7194 · Joesph#7194 · Lofton#7194 · Macon#7194 · Benjiman#7194
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Kadon? See the current top 100.
Choosing between Kadon and another name?
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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