Gatling
surname · Latin script
Meaning: perhaps from a medieval nickname meaning ‘companion, ne’er-do-well’
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈɡætɫɪŋ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Gatling is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- USUnited States
- GBUnited Kingdom
- CACanada
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)
perhaps from a medieval nickname meaning ‘companion, ne’er-do-well’
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
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)
Gatling is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, probably for GADLING, or CATLIN; first attested Geoffrey Gatelin 1274 RH (W)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Possibly a respelling of German Gattling (see Gatlin 2).
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, Gatling gun
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, machine gun
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In Finnish, Gatling gun (predecessor of modern machine gun)
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.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Richard Gatlingb. 1818USAmerican firearm designer (1818–1903)
- Chris Gatlingb. 1967USAmerican basketball player (born 1967)
- Shane Gatlingb. 1998USAmerican basketball player (born 1998)
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 8 sources across 1 country.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.9K | #10,819 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2.8K | #10,835 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.7K | #10,837 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
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 Gatling mean, and where does it come from?
- perhaps from a medieval nickname meaning ‘companion, ne’er-do-well’ Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Gatling?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈɡætɫɪŋ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Gatling have the most bearers?
- Gatling is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Gatling?
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/gatlingThe 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, “Gatling”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.