Halligan
surname · Latin script
Meaning: shortened Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 hAil(l)eagain ‘descendant ofAil(I)eagdn\ a double diminutive of dille ‘beauty’
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 6 countries · latest register: dane.gov.pl, 2026
Halligan is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 103K(measured from records)
- ESSpain1 in 2.5M
- BEBelgium1 in 5.9M
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. 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)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 7 (measured from records)
- 1 in 103K (inferred from the name graph)
3,220 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
United States
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)shortened Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 hAil(l)eagain ‘descendant ofAil(I)eagdn\ a double diminutive of dille ‘beauty’. There has been confusion between this Ulster surname and HallaHAN.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where in the world
(measured from records)Halligan 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 | 3,220 | 1 in 103K | 3.2K | Halligan | 7 |
| ES Spain | 20 | 1 in 2.5M | 20 | — | — |
| PL Poland | 5 | 1 in 7.7M | 3 | — | — |
| BE Belgium | 2 | 1 in 5.9M | 2 | — | — |
| GB United Kingdom | — | — | — | Halligan | 3 |
3,220 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; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population 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)Halligan 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, A tool, used mostly by firemen, to pry open buildings, manholes, wrecked cars, etc.
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)- John Halligan, Jr.b. 1876USadmiral of the United States Navy in the early 20th century
- Brendan Halliganb. 1936IEIrish politician
- Marion Halliganb. 1940AUAustralian novelist
- Dick Halliganb. 1943USAmerican musician and composer (1943–2022)
- Mike Halliganb. 1949USAmerican politician
- Kevin Halliganb. 1964CACanadian poet
- Brian Halliganb. 1967USAmerican businessman
- Liam Halliganb. 1969GBEconomist, journalist, broadcaster
- Shana Halliganb. 1973USAmerican singer-songwriter
- Bronte Halliganb. 1996AUAustralian water polo 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)15 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 3.2K | #10,013 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 3.1K | #9,598 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2.9K | #10,401 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 20 | #86,012 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 20 | #83,413 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 3 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 3 | #261,498 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 2 | #137,899 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #334,555 |
| 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
- 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
- Where does the name Halligan come from?
- shortened Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 hAil(l)eagain ‘descendant ofAil(I)eagdn\ a double diminutive of dille ‘beauty’. There has been confusion between this Ulster surname and HallaHAN. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- What does the name Halligan mean?
- Recorded meaning: shortened Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 hAil(l)eagain ‘descendant ofAil(I)eagdn\ a double diminutive of dille ‘beauty’.
- In which country does Halligan have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 3.2 thousand people named Halligan, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled halligan.
- Where is Halligan most common?
- Halligan is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 103 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Halligan?
- In the United States, the national register counted 3,220 people named Halligan in 2010, about 1 in 103 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Halligan?
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/halliganThe 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, “Halligan”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.