A male name. this is the name of the famous family which is descended from William de Perci, one of the companions of the Conqueror, who took his name from the village of Perci near St-Lô in Normandy. The use of Percy as a christian name seems at first to have been confined to persons connected with the family. The earliest example noted is Lord Percy Seymour (d. 1721), s. of the 6th Duke of Somerset and Lady Elizabeth Percy, heiress of the Percy family. His sister Lady Catherine Seymour m. Sir William Wyndham, and her 2nd s., later Earl of Thomond, was also called Percy. Another example was the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (b. 1792). The connexion between the Shelley and Percy families was very remote; the poet’s grandfather m. (as his second wife) the heiress of the Sidneys, Earls of Leicester, and the 2nd Earl had in 1615 m. Dorothy Percy, d. of the 9th Earl of Northumberland. She was mother of Algernon Sidney, ‘the patron saint of the Whigs’, and it may have been Sir Timothy’s Whiggism rather than his snobbishness which made him call his s. Percy. In the course of the 19th C the name became more and more generally used, and Shelley may himself have contributed to its popularity.

Like Howard and Stanley, it ‘Christianises’ a fine old aristocratic surname,—though in C19-20 it has belonged to the masses as well as the classes. Percy was extremely popular in mid C19 and is still employed in the U. S. A. for ‘a typical young Englishman’ (Weekley, W. & N.). ‘One origin of Percy, Pearcey, Pursey, etc., is (Fr. ) perce-haie, pierce hedge,’ recorded in the Hundred Rolls, 1273, as (William) Percehaye. Weekley, Surnames. Cf. Perceval.

A name derived from Perci, a parish and canton near St. Lo, in Normandy.

A Teutonic name, meaning: Pierce-eye, from a wicked exploit of its original possessor. Some authorities also give this as a diminutive of Percival.