Boy name origins & meanings
- Old English : Blond-haired
Family name origins & meanings
- English : nickname for someone with beautiful long hair, from Middle English fair feax ‘beautiful tresses’. This was a common descriptive phrase in Middle English; the alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight refers to ‘fair fanning fax’ encircling the shoulders of the doughty warrior.
- Thomas Fairfax (1693–1781), an army officer from Leeds Castle, Kent, England, first came to VA in 1735 and settled on maternal estates there as a proprietor in 1747.