McKean
surname · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
McKean is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States. Recorded meaning: Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac lain ‘son of lari’, a Gaelic form of John.
- AUAustralia
- GBUnited Kingdom
- CACanada
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 lain ‘son of lari’, a Gaelic form of John.
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).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
McKean is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, Different form of McKane.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
In English, Michael. US actor
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper 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)
- Thomas McKeanb. 1734USAmerican Founding Father and politician (1734–1817)
- Samuel McKeanb. 1787USAmerican politician (1787-1841)
- Carlos Martínez de Irujo, Duke of Sotomayorb. 1802ESnot in their usual nameformer Prime Minister of Spain (1847)
- James B. McKeanb. 1821USUnion Army officer and American politician (1821-1879)
- Ed McKeanb. 1864USAmerican baseball player (1864-1919)
- Olive McKeanb. 1915USAmerican swimmer, Olympic bronze medalist, coach (1915-2006)
- Michael McKeanb. 1947USAmerican actor and comedian (born 1947)
- David McKeanb. 1956USAmerican diplomat
- Dave McKeanb. 1963GBEnglish artist, photographer, filmmaker and musician
- Sean Mackinb. 1979USnot in their usual nameAmerican musician
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 15 sources across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 5.3K | #6,402 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 4.9K | #6,378 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 4.9K | #6,685 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 12 | #109,635 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 3 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 3 | #275,409 |
| GB United Kingdom | BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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 McKean mean, and where does it come from?
- Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac lain ‘son of lari’, a Gaelic form of John. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does McKean have the most bearers?
- McKean is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about McKean?
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/mckeanThe same 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), and bulk access is licensed separately.
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, “McKean”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.