McFarlan

surname · Latin script

Meaning: from Gaelic Mac Pharthalain, literally 'son of Bartholomew'

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

McFarlan is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 573K(measured from records)
  • BMBermuda≈1 in 33K
  • JMJamaica≈1 in 56K

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)

581 people, 2010

Sources
159 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 33K (inferred from the name graph)

Bermuda, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

from Gaelic Mac Pharthalain, literally 'son of Bartholomew'

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)

McFarlan 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.

Where McFarlan is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—5811 in 573K581McFarlan159
GB United Kingdom—≈160 est.≈1 in 418K—McFarlan46
CA Canada—≈79 est.≈1 in 476K—McFarlan44
IT Italy—≈71 est.≈1 in 875K—McFarlan1
JM Jamaica—≈50 est.≈1 in 56K—McFarlan2
IE Ireland—≈20 est.≈1 in 261K—McFarlan3
BM Bermuda#759≈2 est.≈1 in 33K—McFarlan1

581 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010, counting the spelling mcfarlan. 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. 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

McFarlan is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written McFar-Lan

38 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

McFarlan 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 surname from Scottish Gaelic.

    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)

18001850190019502000Duncan McFarlan, b. 1800Mary Louise McFarlan, b. 1847David McFarlan, b. 1862Alex McFarlan, b. 1869Dan McFarlan, b. 1873William McFarlan, b. 1976

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)

Attested in 9 sources across 2 countries.

Official registers attesting McFarlan
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010581#38,155
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020526#44,069
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000525#39,444
US United Stateswru 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

What does the name McFarlan mean, and where does it come from?
from Gaelic Mac Pharthalain, literally 'son of Bartholomew' Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
In which country does McFarlan have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 581 people named McFarlan, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled McFarlan.
How common is the name McFarlan?
In the United States, the national register counted 581 people named McFarlan in 2010, about 1 in 573 thousand residents.
How common is McFarlan compared with other names?
In Bermuda, McFarlan is the 759th most common surname of 6,699 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about McFarlan?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/mcfarlan

The 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, “McFarlan” — the 759th most common surname in Bermuda. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how McFarlan parses inside a full name →