McDonough
loc · Latin script
Meaning: from Scottish and Irish Gaelic, 'son of Donnchadh'
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 6 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
McDonough is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 15K(measured from records)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 10K
- CACanada≈1 in 14K
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)
- Record sources
- 407 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 10K (inferred from the name graph)
21,739 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
United Kingdom, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled แมคโดนอจท์ in TH Thailand.
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 Scottish and Irish Gaelic, 'son of Donnchadh'
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world
(measured from records)McDonough 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 | 21,739 | 1 in 15K | 22K | McDonough | 407 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈6,500 est. | ≈1 in 10K | — | McDonough | 172 |
| CA Canada | ≈2,700 est. | ≈1 in 14K | — | McDonough | 112 |
| TH Thailand | ≈47 est. | ≈1 in 1.5M | register #991,228 | แมคโดนอจท์ | 18 |
| ES Spain | 22 | 1 in 2.3M | 22 | — | 22 |
| SE Sweden | 14 | 1 in 729K | 14 | — | 12 |
| NO Norway | 8 | 1 in 683K | 8 | — | 4 |
21,739 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); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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)McDonough 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.
Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Donnchadha, patronymic from the personal name Donnchadh, a personal name composed of the elements donn ‘brown’, possibly ‘chieftain’ -i- cath ‘battle’.
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)- William Joseph McDonoughb. 1934USAmerican economist (1934–2018)
- Alexa McDonoughb. 1944CACanadian politician (1944–2022)
- William McDonoughb. 1951USAmerican architect
- Roy McDonoughb. 1958GBEnglish football player and manager (born 1958)
- Mary Elizabeth McDonoughb. 1961USAmerican actress
- Neal McDonoughb. 1966USAmerican actor
- Denis McDonoughb. 1969US11th United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs
- Matthew McDonoughb. 1969USAmerican drummer
- Blair McDonoughb. 1981AUAustralian actor
- Terry McDonoughGBBritish television director
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)16 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 22K | #1,655 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 21K | #1,542 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 21K | #1,677 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 22 | #80,479 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 22 | #78,058 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 14 | #32,837 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 8 | #60,355 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- 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)
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 McDonough mean, and where does it come from?
- from Scottish and Irish Gaelic, 'son of Donnchadh' Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does McDonough have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 22 thousand people named McDonough, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled mcdonough.
- How common is the name McDonough?
- In the United States, the national register counted 21,739 people named McDonough in 2010, about 1 in 15 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about McDonough?
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/mcdonoughThe 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, “McDonough”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.