Variant of Fay, from Old French 'fae' meaning fairy or enchantress, evoking magical charm.
Fae is the English language's most direct portal to the world of fairy. It derives from the Old French fae, itself from the Latin fata — the Fates, those spinning, measuring, and cutting goddesses who governed mortal destinies. Over centuries of folk evolution, fata narrowed from 'fate' to 'fairy,' and the beings themselves became the fae: enchanted, dangerous, beautiful, and amoral in the way that natural forces are amoral.
To call a child Fae is to invoke this entire luminous, slightly unsettling tradition. As a given name it is closely related to Fay (used by the Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay) and to Faith, though it has shed religious overtones almost entirely in favor of the purely mythic. The actress Fay Compton carried it elegantly in early twentieth-century Britain, and it has appeared in literature as a name for characters set slightly apart from ordinary life — women with uncanny perception or otherworldly grace.
Its very brevity — one syllable, three letters — gives it a mysterious compression, a name that seems to withhold more than it reveals. In the twenty-first century, Fae has gained momentum alongside the broader revival of fairy-tale aesthetics in baby naming. It appears frequently in fantasy literature and gaming as a character name, and real-world parents have followed, drawn by its delicacy and its refusal to be sentimental about it. It pairs beautifully as a middle name and stands on its own as a first: short, sure, and trailing something enchanted.