Scottish clan name possibly from Norman French 'fraise' meaning strawberry.
Fraser is a Scottish surname that migrated gracefully into given-name use, carrying with it the misty mythology of the Scottish Highlands. Its origins are debated: one theory traces it to a Norman French place name brought over with the Conquest, while another—more romantic and perhaps apocryphal—connects it to the Old French *fraise*, meaning strawberry, supposedly a heraldic reference to the strawberry flowers on the Clan Fraser coat of arms. A third strand links it to a Gaelic root relating to thickets or brushwood.
The Frasers of Lovat were one of the most powerful Highland clans, and the name became inseparable from Scottish identity during the Jacobite era. Simon Fraser, the Old Fox of Lovat, was the last man beheaded on Tower Hill in 1747—a dramatic endpoint to the Jacobite rising. The name later crossed the Atlantic with Scottish emigrants, becoming a thread in the fabric of Canadian and American history; the Fraser River in British Columbia was named for fur trader Simon Fraser, who navigated its treacherous canyon in 1808.
As a given name, Fraser began appearing steadily in the twentieth century and received a cultural boost from Diana Gabaldon's *Outlander* series, whose hero Jamie Fraser introduced the name to a global readership hungry for romantic Scottish imagery. It now occupies comfortable territory as a first name in Britain, Australia, and beyond—rooted, masculine, and faintly wild-edged.