McGrail
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Reill (earlier Mac Neill), a patronymic from the personal name Niall (see Neill)
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/məˈɡɹeɪɫ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
McGrail is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- USUnited States
- NZNew Zealand
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Reill (earlier Mac Neill), a patronymic from the personal name Niall (see Neill). The substitution of -r- for -n- occurs in a number of Irish Mac- names.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Walter McGrailb. 1888USAmerican actor (1888-1970)
- Sean McGrailb. 1928archaeologist
- John McGrailb. 1956USAmerican long-distance runner
- Joe McGrailb. 1964USAmerican football nose tackle
- Chris McGrailb. 1989GBEnglish footballer (born 1989)
- Peter McGrailb. 1996GBEnglish boxer
- Piers McGrailcinematographer
- Matthew McGrailAUresearcher
- Ben McGrailGBBritish broadcast journalist
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 10 sources across 3 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.2K | #13,700 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2.2K | #13,452 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.2K | #13,040 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 10 | #120,154 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 6 | #53,580 |
| 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
- 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
- Where does the name McGrail come from?
- Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Reill (earlier Mac Neill), a patronymic from the personal name Niall (see Neill). The substitution of -r- for -n- occurs in a number of Irish Mac- names. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce McGrail?
- A machine transcription gives /məˈɡɹeɪɫ/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name McGrail mean?
- Recorded meaning: Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Reill (earlier Mac Neill), a patronymic from the personal name Niall (see Neill).
- In which country does McGrail have the most bearers?
- McGrail is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about McGrail?
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/mcgrailThe 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, “McGrail”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.