The name Missenden is first attested in the Domesday Book as Missedene, with other early attestations including the spellings Messedena and Musindone.A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of English Place Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 330. The -den element probably comes from Old English denu, meaning 'valley', but the etymology of the first element is uncertain. It is thought to occur in the name of the River Misbourne, which rises in Great Missenden, and also in the Hertfordshire place-name Miswell. Frank Stenton and Allen Mawer guessed that it came from a hypothetical Anglo-Saxon personal name Myrsa, which they also supposed to be found in the name of Mursley.A. Mawer and F. M. Stenton, The Place-Names of Buckinghamshire, English Place-Name Society, 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925). Eilert Ekwall suggested that it came from a lost Old English word related to English moss, and to Danish mysse and Swedish missne (which denote plants of the genus Calla, such as water arum).Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 328 (s.v. Misbourne). Recent researchers have tentatively preferred Ekwall's guess, in which case the name Missenden would once have meant something like 'valley where water-plants/marsh-plants grow'.Hough, Carole, 'Place-Name Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Plant-Names', in From Earth to Art, the Many Aspects of the Plant-world in Anglo-Saxon England: Proceedings of the First ASPNS Symposium, University of Glasgow, 5–7 April 2000, ed. by Carole Hough, Costerus New Series, 148 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 41-78 (pp. 54-55).
