Flanagan
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Flanagan is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country. Recorded meaning: from Irish Gaelic O Flannagain, 'descendant of Flannagan', meaning 'little red one'.
- IEIreland≈1 in 2.2K(inferred from the name graph)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 5.4K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 6.1K
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.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 459 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 2.2K (inferred from the name graph)
≈200,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Ireland, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(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)
from Irish Gaelic O Flannagain, 'descendant of Flannagan', meaning 'little red one'.
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)
Flanagan 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | — | ≈200,000 est. | ≈1 in 7.1K | — | Flanagan | 11 |
| US United States | #939 | 30,887 | 1 in 11K | 31K | Flanagan | 459 |
| GB United Kingdom | #584 | ≈11,000 est. | ≈1 in 6.1K | listed | Flanagan | 252 |
| AU Australia | #503 | ≈4,700 est. | ≈1 in 5.4K | — | Flanagan | 176 |
| EG Egypt | — | ≈4,000 est. | ≈1 in 26K | — | Flanagan | 2 |
| IE Ireland | #129 | ≈2,400 est. | ≈1 in 2.2K | — | Flanagan | 131 |
| IS Iceland | — | ≈60 est. | ≈1 in 5.8K | — | Flanagan | 5 |
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 hanks-dictionary-surnames-1988 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)
Flanagan 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, Irish Ó Flannagáin ‘descendant of Flannagán’ (red)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
‘descendant of Flannagan’, a personal name derived from a dim. of the elementflann red(dish), ruddy. Vars.: Flanaghan, Flannagan, Flannigan.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, Fionnula Manon, Irish actress
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
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)
- John Flanaganb. 1873USIrish-American hammer thrower
- Fionnula Flanaganb. 1941IEIrish actress
- Barry Flanaganb. 1941GBBritish sculptor (1941–2009)
- Richard Flanaganb. 1961AUAustralian writer and novelist
- Tommy Flanaganb. 1965GBBritish actor (1965-)
- Maile Flanaganb. 1965USAmerican actress
- Mike Flanaganb. 1978USAmerican filmmaker (born 1978)
- Peggy Flanaganb. 1979USLieutenant Governor of Minnesota since 2019
- Shalane Flanaganb. 1981USAmerican distance runner
- Jon Flanaganb. 1993GBEnglish association football player
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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 28 sources across 18 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 31K | #1,134 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 30K | #1,166 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 30K | #1,079 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- 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)
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
- What does the name Flanagan mean, and where does it come from?
- from Irish Gaelic O Flannagain, 'descendant of Flannagan', meaning 'little red one'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Flanagan have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 196 thousand people named Flanagan in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled flanagan.
- How common is the name Flanagan?
- In the United States, the national register counted 30,887 people named Flanagan in 2010, about 1 in 11 thousand residents.
- How common is Flanagan compared with other names?
- In Ireland, Flanagan is the 129th most common surname of 73,729 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Flanagan?
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/flanaganThe same 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), and bulk access is licensed separately.
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, “Flanagan” — the 129th most common surname in Ireland. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.