Néal
given name · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Néal is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: from an Anglo-Scandinavian form of the Gaelic name Niall (see Neill).
- USUnited States1 in 3.6K(measured from records)
- FIFinland1 in 130K
- CHSwitzerland1 in 311K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 134 (measured from records)
- 1 in 3.6K (inferred from the name graph)
91,694 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Neal in US United States, NC New Caledonia.
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)
from an Anglo-Scandinavian form of the Gaelic name Niall (see Neill). This was adopted by the Scandinavians in the form Njal and was introduced into northern England and East Anglia by them, rather than being taken directly from Gaelic. It was reinforced after the Norman Conquest by the Anglo-Norman French and Middle English forms Neel, Nihel, and Nigel, which were brought to England by the Normans.
Sources 7
- A concise dictionary of first names
- A dictionary of surnames
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- The Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
Attested across 23 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Néal 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 91,694 | 1 in 3.6K | 92K | Neal | 97 |
| IN India | — | 121 | 1 in 11M | 121 | — | — |
| ES Spain | — | 88 | 1 in 568K | 88 | — | 2 |
| FI Finland | — | 43 | 1 in 130K | 52 | — | 1 |
| BR Brazil | — | 39 | 1 in 5.4M | 39 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | — | 27 | 1 in 311K | 27 | — | 5 |
| NO Norway | — | 16 | 1 in 342K | 50 | — | — |
| DK Denmark | — | 11 | 1 in 534K | 20 | — | — |
| NC New Caledonia | #118 | — | — | — | Neal | 6 |
91,694 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; Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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 recorded senses(measured from records)
Néal is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Irish, cloud
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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.
Evidence(measured from records)
No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Néal mean, and where does it come from?
- from an Anglo-Scandinavian form of the Gaelic name Niall (see Neill). Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names and A dictionary of surnames and 5 other sources.
- Is Néal a male or female name?
- Néal is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- In which country does Néal have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 92 thousand people named Néal, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled neal.
- Where is Néal most common?
- Néal is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 3.6 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Néal?
- In the United States, the national register counted 91,694 people named Néal in 2010, about 1 in 3.6 thousand residents.
- How common is Néal compared with other names?
- In New Caledonia, Néal is the 118th most common surname of 1,911 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Néal?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/n%C3%A9alThe 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, “Néal” — the 118th most common surname in New Caledonia. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.