From Old French 'bois' meaning wood or forest, originally a surname for one who lived near woods.
Boyce derives from the Old French "bois," meaning wood or forest, and entered England with the Norman Conquest in the eleventh century. As a surname it was applied to those who lived near or worked in a woodland — a category that encompassed a broad swath of medieval rural society — and it spread widely across England and later into Scotland and Ireland. The transferred use of Boyce as a given name follows the characteristically Anglo-American pattern of honoring maternal family lines or distinguished ancestors by borrowing their surname for a son's first name.
The most historically significant bearer is William Dickson Boyce (1858–1929), the American newspaper magnate and naturalist who founded the Boy Scouts of America in 1910 after a London fog encounter with an unknown Scout led him to Baden-Powell. That single act of civic organization has shaped the lives of tens of millions of young Americans, making Boyce's legacy genuinely vast even if his given name is not widely recognized today. The blues and jazz traditions also claim a Boyce in Boyce Brown, the eccentric Chicago alto saxophonist of the 1930s and 40s who later became a Franciscan friar.
As a first name, Boyce occupied a comfortable niche in the American South and border states through the mid-twentieth century, often bestowed in tribute to family surnames or as a deliberate echo of the Boy Scouts connection. It carries a trim, one-syllable confidence — the same quality that has made surname names like Brooks, Hayes, and Grant perpetually attractive. Its soft, open vowel sound keeps it from feeling harsh, and its rarity today gives any child named Boyce an essentially distinctive identity.