O'Kelly
surname · Latin script
Meaning: O Ceallaigh 'war' or 'contention'; sept of Galway and Roscommon ('O'Kelly's Country'); attested in 1351 when the chief invited musicians and poets to Christmas (Irish family names)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 7 countries · latest register: Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register), 2002
O'Kelly is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 1,508 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010.
- IEIreland≈1 in 25Kfew records(inferred from the name graph)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 130K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 150K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 186 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 25K (inferred from the name graph)
1,508 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Ireland, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Okelly in US United States, GB United Kingdom.
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)O Ceallaigh 'war' or 'contention'; sept of Galway and Roscommon ('O'Kelly's Country'); attested in 1351 when the chief invited musicians and poets to Christmas
Cited for this meaning 1
- Irish family names
Where the surname O'Kelly is found
(measured from records)O'Kelly 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 | — | 1,508 | 1 in 221K | 1.5K | Okelly | 186 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈470 est. | ≈1 in 148K | 789 | Okelly | 85 |
| ZA South Africa | — | ≈250 est. | ≈1 in 255K | — | O'Kelly | 13 |
| IE Ireland | #799 | ≈220 est. | ≈1 in 25K | — | O'Kelly | 60 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈210 est. | ≈1 in 132K | — | O'Kelly | 46 |
1,508 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; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral 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 recorded senses
(measured from records)O'Kelly 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 English, Descendant of Kelly (i).
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
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)- Seán T. O'Kellyb. 1882IEnot in their usual namesecond President of Ireland (1882-1966)
- Alberic O'Kelly de Galwayb. 1911BEnot in their usual nameBelgian chess grandmaster (1911–1980)
- Tim O'Kellyb. 1941USnot in their usual nameAmerican actor (1941–1990)
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)Evidence
(measured from records)11 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 7 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name O'Kelly mean, and where does it come from?
- O Ceallaigh 'war' or 'contention'; sept of Galway and Roscommon ('O'Kelly's Country'); attested in 1351 when the chief invited musicians and poets to Christmas Recorded by Irish family names.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname O'Kelly?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 1.5 thousand people named O'Kelly, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled okelly. After it come United Kingdom, South Africa, Ireland and Australia; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name O'Kelly?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,508 people named O'Kelly in 2010, about 1 in 221 thousand residents.
- How common is O'Kelly compared with other names?
- In Ireland, O'Kelly is the 799th most common surname of 73,729 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about O'Kelly?
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/o'kellyThe 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, “O'Kelly” — ranked 17540th in the United States (Census Bureau, 2010). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.