Geary
surname · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Geary is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: (i) from Irish Gaelic O Gadhra, ‘descendant of Gadhra’ (from gadhar ‘hound’); (ii) from a Germanic personal name beginning gari/geri ‘spear’; (iii) medieval nickname for a capricious person.
- USUnited States1 in 27K(measured from records)
- SESweden1 in 340K
- DKDenmark1 in 838K
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
- 40 (measured from records)
- 1 in 27K (inferred from the name graph)
12,382 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
(i) from Irish Gaelic O Gadhra, ‘descendant of Gadhra’ (from gadhar ‘hound’); (ii) from a Germanic personal name beginning gari/geri ‘spear’; (iii) medieval nickname for a capricious person
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Geary 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.
12,382 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; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (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)
Geary is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
nickname for a wayward or capricious person, from Middle English ge(a)ry ‘ficlde’, ‘changeable’, ‘passionate’ (a derivative of gere ‘fit of passion’, apparently a Scandinavian borrowing).
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
from a personal name derived from Germanic ger, gar ‘spear’, a short form of any of various compound names with this as a first element (see, for example Garrett).
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 Gadhra ‘descendant of Gadhra’ (see O’Gara). See also McGeary.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
Possibly an altered spelling of German Gehring or Gehrig. SsHllSES Most present-day Irish bearers of the name Geary and its variants and derivatives are descended from a single 10thcentury ancestor, a nephew of Eadhra, who founded the family O’Hara in Connacht. The family is now spread more widely.
as a nameDictionary of American Family 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 W. Gearyb. 1819USUnion Army General (1819-1873)
- Fred Gearyb. 1868GBEnglish footballer (1868-1955)
- Bud Gearyb. 1898USAmerican actor (1898-1946)
- Rick Gearyb. 1946USAmerican cartoonist
- Anthony Gearyb. 1947USAmerican actor (1947-2025)
- Patrick J. Gearyb. 1948USAmerican historian
- Cynthia Gearyb. 1965USAmerican actress
- Linda Fridayb. 1971USnot in their usual nameAmerican pornographic actress
- Karl Gearyb. 1972USAmerican actor and writer (b. 1972)
- Reggie Gearyb. 1973USAmerican basketball guard
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 24 sources across 12 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 12K | #2,895 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 12K | #2,717 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 12K | #2,989 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 30 | #18,993 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 22 | #80,319 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 22 | #78,058 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 18 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 8 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 8 | #150,946 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 7 | #50,706 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #330,278 |
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- 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 Geary mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) from Irish Gaelic O Gadhra, ‘descendant of Gadhra’ (from gadhar ‘hound’); (ii) from a Germanic personal name beginning gari/geri ‘spear’; (iii) medieval nickname for a capricious person Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Geary have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 12 thousand people named Geary, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled geary.
- Where is Geary most common?
- Geary is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 27 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Geary?
- In the United States, the national register counted 12,382 people named Geary in 2010, about 1 in 27 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Geary?
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/gearyThe 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, “Geary”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.