Old English for 'friend's field'; originally a surname from a place name.
Winfield is an English place-name surname pressed into service as a given name, built from Old English components that most likely mean "friend's open land" or "pasture belonging to a friend," combining "wine" (friend, as in the same root that gives us "Edwin" and "Oswin") with "feld" (open land, field). Place names of this pattern appear across the English Midlands, and like many topographical surnames — Lincoln, Clayton, Sheffield — Winfield migrated into the given-name column during the great nineteenth-century American fashion for bestowing distinguished surnames on sons. The name rose to particular prominence through two celebrated American military figures.
S. Army for twenty years, a hero of the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War, the Whig Party's 1852 presidential candidate, and one of the longest-serving senior officers in American history. His fame was such that an entire generation of parents named sons Winfield in his honor.
Winfield Scott Hancock (1824–1886), himself named for the general, fought with distinction at Gettysburg and later lost the 1880 presidential election by fewer than ten thousand popular votes — a near-thing that kept the name circulating in political memory. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Winfield was firmly established as a dignified American masculine name, particularly in families with military, civic, or Midwestern farming traditions. Today it carries the pleasantly weathered authority of a name from an earlier American republic — substantial, honest, and unhurried.