Cunningham

surname · Latin script

Meaning: (i) person from Cunningham, Ayrshire; originally Cunegan, a Celtic place-name of unknown origin

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

/ˈkənɪŋˌhæm/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Cunningham is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Jamaica it is the 53rd most common surname.

rarermore common
  • IEIreland≈1 in 1.1K(inferred from the name graph)
  • JMJamaica≈1 in 1.5K
  • GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 1.8K

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

135,718 people, 2010

#623 (measured from records)

of 19M surnames

3 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
560 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 1.1K (inferred from the name graph)

Ireland, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

CunninghamLatin(measured from records)
คันนิงแฮมThai(measured from records)
커닝엄Hangul(measured from records)

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

(i) person from Cunningham, Ayrshire; originally Cunegan, a Celtic place-name of unknown origin. (ii) from Irish Gaelic O Cuinneagdin, descendant of Cuinneagdn.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Cunningham counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.

Where Cunningham is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#175135,7181 in 2.5K136KCunningham560
GB United Kingdom#138≈37,000 est.≈1 in 1.8KlistedCunningham297
EG Egypt—≈15,000 est.≈1 in 7.1K—Cunningham14
CA Canada#183≈15,000 est.≈1 in 2.6K—Cunningham268
IT Italy#338≈13,000 est.≈1 in 4.9K—Cunningham39
AU Australia#198≈11,000 est.≈1 in 2.2K—Cunningham227
IE Ireland#69≈4,500 est.≈1 in 1.1K—Cunningham138
NZ New Zealand#150≈2,400 est.≈1 in 2K—Cunningham123
JM Jamaica#53≈1,800 est.≈1 in 1.5K—Cunningham24

135,718 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.

Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; the scottish-surnames-ross-1994 register. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).

Other names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Cunningham is also recorded as 3 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • French surname3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, United Kingdom, Canada

    Languages: French, Catalan

    Also written Cunninghàm

  • Hindi surname6 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland

    Languages: Hindi, Sinhala, Urdu

    Also written Çunningham

  • Greek surname2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Greece, United States, United Kingdom, Ireland

    Also written Κανινγκχαμ

62 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Cunningham is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, Ancient territorial name from north Ayrshire of obscure Celtic origin; assumed as de Cunningham c.1170 by an incoming Norman family.

    as a nameScottish Surnames

  • In English, A Scottish habitational surname and clan.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Irish, The name of Scottish settlers, widely adopted as the modern form of Irish surnames. Matheson in his report on synonyms in birth registrations gives no less than 20 for Cunningham, e.g. Cunnegan, Kinnegan and even Coon. See also under Dongan. Bibl; IF 104

    as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Notable people with this name(measured from records)

1700180019002000John Cunningham Saunders, b. 1773John Cunningham Geikie, b. 1824John C. Kelton, b. 1828Charles Boycott, b. 1832Alice Cunningham Fletcher, b. 1838Thomas Cunningham Cochran, b. 1877Walter Thomson, b. 1895Dorothy Donaldson, b. 1915Andrew Cunningham Scott, b. 1952Graham Platner, b. 1984

The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).

How to address them(machine-generated)

FormalDear Cunningham,
InformalHello,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 38 sources across 25 countries.

Official registers attesting Cunningham
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010136K#211
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000132K#198
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020129K#229
GB United KingdomScottish Surnames (Ross, 1994)———
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 5

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
  • jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.

Frequently asked questions

Where does the name Cunningham come from?
(i) person from Cunningham, Ayrshire; originally Cunegan, a Celtic place-name of unknown origin. (ii) from Irish Gaelic O Cuinneagdin, descendant of Cuinneagdn. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
In which country does Cunningham have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 136 thousand people named Cunningham, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled cunningham.
How do you pronounce Cunningham?
A machine transcription gives /ˈkənɪŋˌhæm/ (IPA) for English.
What does the name Cunningham mean?
Recorded meaning: (i) person from Cunningham, Ayrshire; originally Cunegan, a Celtic place-name of unknown origin.
How common is the name Cunningham?
In the United States, the national register counted 135,718 people named Cunningham in 2010, about 1 in 2.5 thousand residents.
How common is Cunningham compared with other names?
In the United States, Cunningham is the 175th most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Cunningham?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/cunningham

The payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.

About this data

measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated

These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Cunningham” — the 175th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Cunningham parses inside a full name →