Variant of Chauncey, from an Old French place name meaning 'estate of Cantius.'
Chancey is a variant spelling of Chauncey, a name with a pleasingly uncertain etymology — fitting, perhaps, for a name that suggests fortune and happenstance. The most likely origin is the English surname Chauncey, derived from a Norman-French place name — possibly Chancé in Normandy — brought to England after the Conquest of 1066. An alternative theory connects it to the Old French *chancier*, related to chance or luck, which would give the name a meaning of remarkable aptness for its sound and feel.
A third possibility traces it to a medieval Latin form of the Roman name Canutus. In America, Chauncey and Chancey were used most prominently in the nineteenth century, particularly in New England and among families conscious of old Yankee lineage. Chauncey Depew was a prominent New York senator and railroad lawyer of the Gilded Age, known for his oratory.
The name appears in Mark Twain's satirical universe of self-important characters with multi-syllabic names, and it carried a certain genteel pomposity in that era — the name of a man who wore a watch chain and had opinions about tariff policy. The spelling Chancey softens the name and tilts it slightly toward the Southern and Western American naming traditions, where phonetic spelling was more common and formality less prized. It also foregrounds the audible connection to 'chance,' giving the name a wanderer's lightness. In the twenty-first century, Chancey reads as genuinely distinctive — not quite archaic, not quite modern, with an old-soul ease that belongs to names that have traveled far enough through time to shed their pretensions.