From Old English 'boc leah' meaning beech tree meadow; also an Irish surname.
Buckley is an English surname transplanted into given-name use, its roots reaching back to Old English: "bucca" (a male deer, a buck) combined with "leah" (a woodland clearing or meadow). The compound yields a pleasingly specific Old English landscape image — a glade where deer come to graze, a place of stillness at the forest's edge. As a place name Buckley appears in Wales and England; as a family surname it was common throughout the British Isles and traveled with emigrant communities to America, Australia, and Canada, where it became well established.
The name's most famous bearers have given it a distinctive intellectual and artistic charge: William F. , the American conservative commentator and founder of National Review, brought it into the mid-20th-century political lexicon, while musicians Tim Buckley and his son Jeff Buckley — whose 1994 album Grace remains one of the most critically revered records in American rock — gave the name a cult artistic resonance. Jeff Buckley's early death at 30 amplified the name's romantic, almost mythological quality.
As a given name Buckley has been used as an affectionate surname-style first name, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition of bestowing family surnames on children as a way of honoring maternal lineage or simply embracing the pleasingly chunky, confident sound. It sits comfortably alongside Beckett, Fletcher, and Harlow in the modern surname-name canon.