The story
From Higgs (“a surname”) + field; named after British physicist Peter Higgs, who is credited with proposing what is now called the Higgs mechanism.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Higgs field
Today it means: A theoretical scalar field associated with electroweak symmetry breaking, the quantum of which is the Higgs boson; interaction with this field is hypothesised to give elementary particles their mass. Full definition →