Fairfax
loc · Latin script
Meaning: from a medieval nickname for someone with beautiful hair (Old English feax ‘hair’)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 4 countries · latest register: dane.gov.pl, 2026
Fairfax is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- VAVatican City
- ESSpain
- FIFinland
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)from a medieval nickname for someone with beautiful hair (Old English feax ‘hair’)
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses
(measured from records)Fairfax is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, from OE faeger ‘fair’ + feax ‘hair’; first attested Nicholas Faierfax 1195 P (Y)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, long hair, from OE fceger lovely + feax hair, tresses.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, A surname transferred from the nickname that was originally a nickname for someone with long fair hair.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Robert Fayrfaxb. 1464GBnot in their usual nameEnglish Renaissance composer
- Ferdinando Fairfax, 2nd Baron Fairfax of Cameronb. 1584GBEnglish politician and general (1584-1648)
- Thomas Fairfaxb. 1612GBParliamentary commander-in-chief during the English Civil War (1612-1671)
- Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameronb. 1693GBAmerican planter
- Mary Somervilleb. 1780GBnot in their usual nameScottish scientist, writer and polymath (1780–1872)
- Fairfax Moresbyb. 1786INBritish Royal Navy admiral (1786-1877)
- Charles S. Fairfaxb. 1829USAmerican politician (1829-1869)
- Marion Fairfaxb. 1875USAmerican actress, playwright and producer (1875–1970)
- Kaarin Fairfaxb. 1959AUAustralian actress
- Justin Edward Fairfaxb. 1979USAmerican attorney and politician (1979–2026)
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
Evidence
(measured from records)13 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.5K | #18,431 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 1.5K | #18,622 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 1.4K | #17,970 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #327,556 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 1 | #624 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Fairfax mean, and where does it come from?
- from a medieval nickname for someone with beautiful hair (Old English feax ‘hair’) Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Fairfax have the most bearers?
- Fairfax is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Fairfax?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/fairfaxThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Fairfax”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.