Lough
surname · Latin script
Meaning: From Irish Gaelic O Lachtndin, a personal name from lachtna ‘grey’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/lɒk/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Lough is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 91K(measured from records)
- PLPoland1 in 9.6M
- CZCzechia1 in 11M
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
- 20 (measured from records)
- 1 in 91K (inferred from the name graph)
3,641 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
From Irish Gaelic O Lachtndin, a personal name from lachtna ‘grey’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Lough 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.
3,641 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; dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); MVČR — living population register 2017; 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)
Lough 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.
reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 Lachtnain ‘descendant of Lachtndri’, a personal name from lachtna ‘gray’. This is the name of several families' in Ireland, and has more often been Anglicized as Loughlin or Loughran, and in County Cork as Lawton.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In Irish, A variant of the Scottish toponymic Loch, in Ulster since the early seventeenth century
as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland
In yol, Of Ballymacushin, near the Commons.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In enm, lake
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)
- Thomas Loughb. 1850IEBritish politician (1850–1922)
- Reginald Dawson Hopcraft Loughb. 1885GBBritish military personnel (1885-1958)
- Catherine Lough Haggquistb. 1901CACanadian actress
- John Loughb. 1913GBBritish university teacher (1913-2000)
- Rodney Lough Jr.b. 1960USAmerican photographer
- Dorian Loughb. 1966GBBritish actor
- Peter Loughb. 1975CACanadian lacrosse player
- Gerard Loughb. 1978IEIrish film director
- David Loughb. 1986USAmerican baseball player
- Janice M. LoughGBclimate scientist
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 12 sources across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 3.6K | #8,986 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 3.6K | #8,495 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 3.4K | #9,134 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 4 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 4 | #228,687 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 1 | #162,112 |
| CZ Czechia | MVČR — living population register 2017 | — | 1 | #244,445 |
| CZ Czechia | KdeJsme.cz — četnost jmen a příjmení (MVČR population register front-end) | — | 1 | #26,384 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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 Lough mean, and where does it come from?
- From Irish Gaelic O Lachtndin, a personal name from lachtna ‘grey’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Lough?
- A machine transcription gives /lɒk/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Lough have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 3.6 thousand people named Lough, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled lough.
- Where is Lough most common?
- Lough is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 91 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Lough?
- In the United States, the national register counted 3,641 people named Lough in 2010, about 1 in 91 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Lough?
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/loughThe 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, “Lough”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.