Storey is an English surname and word name associated with narrative, history, or layered structure.
Storey sits at the intersection of two naming fashions that have converged powerfully in the twenty-first century: the use of English-language words as given names, and the adoption of surnames as first names. As a surname, Storey is of English and Scots origin, derived from the Old Norse personal name Stórr (meaning "great" or "large") or, in some lineages, from a medieval occupational connection to storytelling — the Old French estoree, meaning "history" or "narrative." The surname Storey appears in English records from the thirteenth century onward and was carried by, among others, the British architect George Edmund Street's contemporary Richard James Storey.
As a given name, Storey benefits enormously from its association with the English common noun — a story, the fundamental unit of human meaning-making. To be named Storey is to carry a quiet philosophical suggestion: that one's life is itself a narrative in progress, something being written, a thing with plot and character and the possibility of surprise. The variant spelling with the "e" distinguishes it from the architectural "storey" (a floor of a building) while also giving it a slightly more antique, bookish quality, like something found in the margins of an old manuscript.
Storey has emerged as a given name in the early twenty-first century alongside other word-names like Story, Harbor, and True, all of which reflect a parental desire for names that feel meaningful in plain English rather than requiring etymological excavation. It is equally plausible on a boy or a girl, gender-neutral in the way that many of the most durable modern names tend to be.