McKinney
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Anglicized form of GaeUc Mac Cionaodha or Mac Cionaoith ‘son of Cionaodh’, a personal name which is probably composed of the elements cion ‘respect’, ‘affection’ +Aodh, a Gaelic personal name, origina
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 10 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
McKinney is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 4K(measured from records)
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 4K
- IEIreland≈1 in 4.3K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. 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
- 511 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 4.0K (inferred from the name graph)
83,616 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
New Zealand, est.
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)Anglicized form of GaeUc Mac Cionaodha or Mac Cionaoith ‘son of Cionaodh’, a personal name which is probably composed of the elements cion ‘respect’, ‘affection’ +Aodh, a Gaelic personal name, originally the name of the Celtic god of fire. The personal name thus probably means ‘beloved of Aodh’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)McKinney 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 | #315 | 83,616 | 1 in 4K | 84K | McKinney | 511 |
| GB United Kingdom | #630 | ≈12,000 est. | ≈1 in 5.6K | — | McKinney | 175 |
| CA Canada | #574 | ≈7,400 est. | ≈1 in 5.6K | — | McKinney | 144 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈2,900 est. | ≈1 in 9.2K | — | McKinney | 85 |
| NZ New Zealand | #433 | ≈1,300 est. | ≈1 in 4K | — | McKinney | 45 |
| IE Ireland | #423 | ≈1,200 est. | ≈1 in 4.3K | — | McKinney | 52 |
| SG Singapore | #460 | ≈1,100 est. | ≈1 in 5.3K | — | McKinney | 6 |
83,616 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010, counting the spelling mckinney. 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 recorded senses
(measured from records)McKinney 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 Coinnigh ‘son of Coinneach’, an Old Irish personal name equivalent to Scottish Kenneth. Compare Kenny. Also the Scottish name as in 1.
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)- Nina Mae McKinneyb. 1912USAmerican actress (1912-1967)
- Bones McKinneyb. 1919USAmerican basketball player-coach
- Bill McKinneyb. 1931USAmerican actor (1931–2011)
- Jack McKinneyb. 1935USAmerican basketball player and coach (1935–2018)
- Frank McKinneyb. 1938USAmerican swimmer, Olympic gold medalist, former world record-holder, bank executive (1938-1992)
- Cynthia McKinneyb. 1955USAmerican politician and activist
- Mark McKinneyb. 1959CACanadian actor and comedian
- Kurt McKinneyb. 1962USAmerican actor
- Gil McKinneyb. 1979USAmerican actor
- Charlotte McKinneyb. 1993USAmerican model, Internet celebrity and actress
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)22 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 10 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 84K | #377 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 81K | #353 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 80K | #391 |
| 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
- What does the name McKinney mean, and where does it come from?
- Anglicized form of GaeUc Mac Cionaodha or Mac Cionaoith ‘son of Cionaodh’, a personal name which is probably composed of the elements cion ‘respect’, ‘affection’ +Aodh, a Gaelic personal name, origina… Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does McKinney have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 84 thousand people named McKinney, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled McKinney.
- How common is the name McKinney?
- In the United States, the national register counted 83,616 people named McKinney in 2010, about 1 in 4.0 thousand residents.
- How common is McKinney compared with other names?
- In the United States, McKinney is the 315th most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about McKinney?
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/mckinneyThe 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, “McKinney” — the 315th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.