Named after the River Roding, which flows just east of the station.
The river and the Rodings, a group of eight Essex villages on its upper course, take their name from Hroða, an Anglo-Saxon leader whose people, the Hroðingas, settled there in the sixth century. The lower river was anciently called the Hyle, a name kept in Ilford, the ford on the Hyle. The station opened in 1936 as Roding Valley Halt.