Variant of Quincy, from a Norman French place name meaning 'estate of the fifth son.'
Quincey is a patrician English surname repurposed as a given name, tracing its lineage to the Norman French place name Quincy — a village near Paris whose name derives in turn from the Latin personal name Quintus, meaning "fifth." Norman settlers brought the name to England after 1066, where it became an aristocratic family name.
The de Quincy family was prominent enough in medieval England that Saer de Quincy was among the barons who helped draft Magna Carta in 1215. The name gained literary immortality through Thomas De Quincey, the nineteenth-century English essayist famous for his confessional masterpiece Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), a work that helped inaugurate the tradition of literary addiction memoir and influenced generations of Romantic and later writers. Bram Stoker gave the spelling Quincey (with an 'e') to one of his most heroic characters: Quincey Morris, the brave Texan in Dracula (1897) who ultimately delivers the killing blow to the vampire — a gallant death that gave the spelling a certain swashbuckling association.
The Quincey spelling feels slightly more antiquated and literary than the more common Quincy, which gained American presidential associations through John Quincy Adams. For parents drawn to names with genuine historical pedigree — Norman conquest, Magna Carta, Victorian literature — Quincey offers remarkable depth in six letters.