The name Dunfermline mixes "dun" (a fortified hill or outcrop) with "ferm lynn," which is thought to mean a crooked stream, though no one is entirely sure. People have been living on this defensible site since around 3000 BC. The town only enters recorded history around 1070, when King Malcolm III, fleeing the Norman conquest of England, married Margaret of Wessex, an English princess whose family had also been displaced. Together they made Dunfermline their royal residence and ecclesiastical capital. Margaret was later canonised as St Margaret of Scotland for her piety, her hospital-building, and her gentle reform of the Scottish church. The shrine she founded at Dunfermline became one of medieval Scotland's most important pilgrimage sites. The fortunes of Dunfermline rose and fell with those of an independent Scotland.

When Robert the Bruce died in 1329, his body was brought to Dunfermline Abbey for burial. His heart was removed first, packed in a casket, and carried on crusade by Sir James Douglas, who threw it into the thick of a battle against the Moors in Spain shouting, "Forward, brave heart, as thou wert wont to do, and Douglas will follow thee." The heart was eventually returned and buried at Melrose Abbey. The rest of Bruce remains at Dunfermline. The medieval abbey was wrecked during the Scottish Reformation in 1560 and his tomb was lost. In 1818, workmen rebuilding the parish church on the abbey nave's old foundations found a vault containing a skeleton with its breastbone sawn open, the cut consistent with the removal of a heart. The new tower of the church was built with the words KING ROBERT THE BRUCE carved in stone letters around its top. You can read them from a mile away.

In November 1835, in a small handloom weaver's cottage at 2 Moodie Street, Andrew Carnegie was born. His father William was a damask weaver whose trade was being destroyed by mechanised looms. The family emigrated to Pittsburgh in 1848, where the twelve-year-old Andrew began work as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill for $1.20 a week. He would die seventy-one years later as the man who had built the world's largest steel empire and then given away most of his fortune. Dunfermline received an early share. In 1902 Carnegie bought Pittencrieff Park, the wooded estate beside the abbey, and gave it to the people of his hometown. In 1883 he funded the first Carnegie Library anywhere in the world, here at Dunfermline. "Let there be light" is carved above its door. The cottage where he was born at 2 Moodie Street is now a museum.

The town burned down on 25 May 1624, and the patronage that had once flowed from royal Scotland was already gone. Coal mining, salt panning, limestone quarrying, and linen weaving sustained the area through the next two centuries, until the Victorian railways and shipping concentrated industry in fewer larger places. Dunfermline's port at Rosyth was carved off in 1909 to become a separate town and Royal Navy base. The opening of the Forth Road Bridge in 1964 turned the city into part of the Edinburgh commuter belt, and it has expanded eastward ever since to the natural boundary of the M90. In 2022, as part of the Platinum Jubilee, Dunfermline was awarded city status, a recognition that probably surprised no one who had been here for any length of time. It had, after all, been a capital long before Edinburgh.