From Old English place-name style 'rook town' meaning a settlement near rooks, used as a surname-style first name.
Ruxton is an English topographic surname whose roots lie in the Anglo-Saxon place-name tradition. The "-ton" element is one of the most productive suffixes in Old English, derived from "tūn," meaning a settlement, farm, or estate. The "Rux-" prefix may derive from a personal name — possibly a contracted form of a Norman or Old English given name — or from a topographic feature of a specific locale.
Ruxton appears as a place name in historical records in England, and the transition from place name to family surname to, occasionally, given name follows a well-worn English pattern. As a surname, Ruxton carries a complicated historical echo in British popular memory: Buck Ruxton, a Bombay-born doctor practicing in Lancaster, England, was convicted in 1936 of the brutal murders of his wife and housemaid — a case that became a landmark in forensic pathology, among the first to use forensic entomology and photographic superimposition techniques to identify victims. The case was widely reported and the name Ruxton became briefly notorious, though that association has faded substantially with passing generations.
As a given name in the twenty-first century, Ruxton is almost entirely clean of that history, encountered instead as a bold, aristocratic-sounding choice with the cadence parents often seek in surname-as-first-name selections: two syllables, a hard consonant early, and a satisfying "-ton" landing. It sits beside names like Daxton, Paxton, and Braxton in sound, but carries a more distinctly English, even antiquarian, character — a name that sounds as though it belongs on a country estate.