Galligan
surname · Latin script
Meaning: reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 Gealagain ‘descendant of Gealagdn', a personal name from a double diminutive of geal ‘bright’, ‘white’
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈɡæɫɪɡən/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Galligan is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- AUAustralia
- GBUnited Kingdom
- USUnited States
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 Gealagain ‘descendant of Gealagdn', a personal name from a double diminutive of geal ‘bright’, ‘white’.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
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)
Galligan is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
‘descendant of Gealagan’, a personal name from a double dim. oigeal bright, white.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
‘descendant of Gealagdn', a personal name from a double dim. of geal bright, white.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
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)
- Pete Galliganb. 1860USAmerican baseball player (1860–1917)
- John Galliganb. 1865USAmerican baseball player
- Paul Galliganb. 1888IEIrish politician (1888-1966)
- Tom Galliganb. 1946USAmerican politician and businessman
- Zach Galliganb. 1964USAmerican actor
- Mike Galliganb. 1968IEIrish hurler and Gaelic football player
- Rory Galliganb. 1973IEIrish rally driver
- Roseanne Galliganb. 1987IEIrish athletics competitor
- Danielle Galliganb. 1992IEIrish actor
- Rosie Galliganb. 1998GBEngland rugby union 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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 18 sources across 10 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 3.7K | #8,938 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 3.5K | #8,737 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 3.1K | #9,974 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 14 | #48,415 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 7 | #143,513 |
| CR Costa Rica | TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names | — | 4 | #9,834 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 4 | #67,777 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 3 | #62,299 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #330,437 |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — Visualizador de Nombres y Apellidos, per-token query API (1900–2024) | 1993 | 1 | — |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — Visualizador de Nombres y Apellidos, per-token query API (1900–2024) | — | 1 | — |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Galligan mean, and where does it come from?
- reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 Gealagain ‘descendant of Gealagdn', a personal name from a double diminutive of geal ‘bright’, ‘white’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Galligan?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈɡæɫɪɡən/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Galligan have the most bearers?
- Galligan is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Galligan?
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/galliganThe 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, “Galligan”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.