From Old French 'noreis' meaning northerner, or a nurse/caretaker occupational name.
Norris began its life not as a given name but as an occupational and directional surname, derived from the Old French "noreis" or "norois," meaning simply "the northerner" — a tag applied to settlers or servants who had migrated from the north. Norman scribes carried it into English records after 1066, and over centuries it migrated from the rolls of feudal tenants into the register of respectable family surnames. The transition to given name followed the well-worn 19th-century pattern of honoring a mother's maiden name by bestowing it upon a son.
As a literary surname, Norris carries considerable weight. Frank Norris, the American naturalist novelist whose works "McTeague" (1899) and "The Octopus" (1901) exposed the brutal machinery of Gilded Age capitalism, gave the name an intellectual, muckraking edge. In the drawing rooms of British fiction, Norris appears more comfortably — most famously as the oblivious, self-serving Mrs.
K. Rowling later borrowed the name for Harry Potter's equally watchful and disagreeable cat. In popular culture, the name's biggest modern moment belongs to Carlos Ray "Chuck" Norris, whose action-hero career in the 1980s turned "Norris" into a byword for stoic toughness and later into the subject of an entire internet mythology.
The meme-ification of Chuck Norris — "Chuck Norris doesn't do push-ups, he pushes the Earth down" — gave the surname an almost folkloric quality. As a first name today, Norris reads as quietly distinguished, neither aggressively vintage nor straining for modernity.