Magill
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) from Gaelic Mac An Ghoill, literally ‘son of the stranger’; (ii) a shortened form of various Irish Gaelic names beginning with Mac Giolla ‘son of the servant of ...’; (iii) from Scottish Gaelic Ma
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈmædʒəɫ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Magill is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 58K(measured from records)
- DKDenmark1 in 226K
- SISlovenia1 in 421K
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)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 10 (measured from records)
- 1 in 58K (inferred from the name graph)
5,692 people, 2010
recorded for this name
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)
- Gaelic Mac AnGhoill(measured from records)
- Scottish Gaelic MacGhill(measured from records)
(i) from Gaelic Mac An Ghoill, literally ‘son of the stranger’; (ii) a shortened form of various Irish Gaelic names beginning with Mac Giolla ‘son of the servant of ...’; (iii) from Scottish Gaelic Mac Ghill Mhaoil.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Magill 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 | 5,692 | 1 in 58K | 5.7K | Magill | 10 |
| DK Denmark | 26 | 1 in 226K | 26 | — | — |
| ES Spain | 19 | 1 in 2.6M | 19 | — | — |
| SE Sweden | 6 | 1 in 1.7M | 6 | — | — |
| SI Slovenia | 5 | 1 in 421K | 5 | — | — |
5,692 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; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank). 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)
Magill 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.
1. Anglicized form of Mac an Ghoill ‘son of the lowlander or stranger’. In Ireland the name was given to the descendants of early Anglo-Norman settlers. 2. probably in some cases a short form of a surname beginning Mac Giolla.
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)
- Charles Magillb. 1759USAmerican politician
- Ivan Magillb. 1888GBIrish anaesthetist (1888-1986)
- Margaret Magillb. 1888NZNew Zeaaland educator and politician (1888–1962)
- Ronald Magillb. 1920GBBritish actor (1920-2007)
- Eddie Magillb. 1939GBNorthern Irish footballer and manager
- Alan Magillb. 1953USAmerican physician
- M. Elizabeth Magillb. 1966USAmerican legal scholar
- Santiago Magillb. 1977PEPeruvian actor
- Matt Magillb. 1989USAmerican baseball player
- Simone Magillb. 1994GBNorthern Irish 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 15 sources across 7 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 5.7K | #6,036 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 5.3K | #5,953 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 5.2K | #6,280 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 26 | #18,856 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 19 | #86,409 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 6 | #51,787 |
| SI Slovenia | stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank) | — | 5 | #27,426 |
| 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 Magill mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) from Gaelic Mac An Ghoill, literally ‘son of the stranger’; (ii) a shortened form of various Irish Gaelic names beginning with Mac Giolla ‘son of the servant of ...’; (iii) from Scottish Gaelic Ma… Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Magill?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈmædʒəɫ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Magill have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 5.7 thousand people named Magill, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled magill.
- Where is Magill most common?
- Magill is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 58 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Magill?
- In the United States, the national register counted 5,692 people named Magill in 2010, about 1 in 58 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Magill?
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/magillThe 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, “Magill”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.