Hickey
surname · Latin script
Meaning: From Irish Gaelic O hIcidhe, ‘descendant of Icidhe’, a nickname meaning literally ‘healer’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/hɪki/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Hickey is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- IEIreland≈1 in 2.1K(inferred from the name graph)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 5K
- CACanada≈1 in 7K
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.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 445 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 2.1K (inferred from the name graph)
29,350 people, 2010
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 hIcidhe, ‘descendant of Icidhe’, a nickname meaning literally ‘healer’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Hickey 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 | #986 | 29,350 | 1 in 11K | 29K | Hickey | 445 |
| GB United Kingdom | #760 | ≈8,800 est. | ≈1 in 7.5K | listed | Hickey | 215 |
| CA Canada | #610 | ≈5,400 est. | ≈1 in 7K | — | Hickey | 203 |
| AU Australia | #458 | ≈5,000 est. | ≈1 in 5K | — | Hickey | 180 |
| EG Egypt | — | ≈5,000 est. | ≈1 in 21K | — | Hickey | 9 |
| IE Ireland | #127 | ≈2,500 est. | ≈1 in 2.1K | — | Hickey | 134 |
| NZ New Zealand | #551 | ≈670 est. | ≈1 in 7.3K | — | Hickey | 104 |
29,350 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; 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)
Hickey 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, O hicidhe 'healer'; sept of Clare, Limerick, Tipperary
as a nameIrish family names
In English, diminutive of Hick, a pet-form of Richard; first attested John Hicci 1279 RH (C)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
cendant of Icidhe’, a byname meaning ‘Doctor’, ‘Healer’. Vars.: O’Hickey, O’Hickee, Hickie, Hicky.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 hiceadh ‘descendant of Icidhe', a byname meaning ‘doctor’, ‘healer’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
cendant of Icidhe’, a byname meaning ‘Doctor’, ‘Healer’. Higgett see Hick
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)
- Thomas Hickeyb. 1701IEfirst person executed for sedition by revolutionary Army of the United Colonies
- Rich Hickeyb. 1901USAmerican chief technology officer
- John Joseph Hickeyb. 1911USAmerican politician (1911-1970)
- James Aloysius Hickeyb. 1920USCatholic cardinal (1920-2004)
- William Hickeyb. 1927USAmerican actor (1927–1997)
- Dave Hickeyb. 1940USAmerican art critic
- John Benjamin Hickeyb. 1963USAmerican actor
- Kenny Hickeyb. 1966USAmerican guitarist and singer
- Angus Cloudb. 1998USnot in their usual nameAmerican actor from California (1998–2023)
- Aaron Hickeyb. 2002GBScottish 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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 29 sources across 17 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 29K | #1,206 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 29K | #1,105 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 28K | #1,253 |
| 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 6
- 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
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
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 Hickey mean, and where does it come from?
- From Irish Gaelic O hIcidhe, ‘descendant of Icidhe’, a nickname meaning literally ‘healer’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Hickey?
- A machine transcription gives /hɪki/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Hickey have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 29 thousand people named Hickey, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled hickey.
- How common is the name Hickey?
- In the United States, the national register counted 29,350 people named Hickey in 2010, about 1 in 11 thousand residents.
- How common is Hickey compared with other names?
- In the United States, Hickey is the 986th most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Hickey?
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/hickeyThe 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, “Hickey” — the 986th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.