Family name origins & meanings
- English : habitational name from a place in West Yorkshire named Colden, from Old English cald ‘cold’ col ‘charcoal’ + denu ‘valley’.
- English and Scottish : variant of Cowden.
- Cadwallader Colden (1688–1778), physician, botanist, and mathematician, who for fifteen years was lieutenant-governor of New York colony, was born in Dalkeith, Scotland.