McLennan
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Gille Fhinneain, a patronymic from a personal name meaning ‘servant of (Saint) Fionndn', a personal name representng a diminutive of fionn ‘white’ (Dictionary of American Family Names)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 8 countries · latest register: Guyana, 2025
McLennan is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Australia than in any other country. In Belize it is the 98th most common surname.
- AUAustralia≈1 in 7.6K(inferred from the name graph)
- BZBelize≈1 in 12Kfew records
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 15Kfew records
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.
- Australia (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 294 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 7.6K (inferred from the name graph)
≈3,600 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Australia, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Gille Fhinneain, a patronymic from a personal name meaning ‘servant of (Saint) Fionndn', a personal name representng a diminutive of fionn ‘white’. There were several early Irish saints of this name, most notably a 7th-century bishop who governed the Church established in Northumbria and evangelized parts of southern England.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where the surname McLennan is found
(measured from records)McLennan 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AU Australia | #731 | ≈3,600 est. | ≈1 in 7.6K | — | McLennan | 167 |
| US United States | — | 2,425 | 1 in 137K | 2.4K | McLennan | 294 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 42K | — | McLennan | 166 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 25K | — | McLennan | 150 |
| ZA South Africa | — | ≈440 est. | ≈1 in 145K | — | McLennan | 28 |
| NZ New Zealand | — | ≈350 est. | ≈1 in 15K | — | McLennan | 87 |
| BZ Belize | #98 | ≈34 est. | ≈1 in 12K | — | McLennan | 1 |
| GY Guyana | — | 18 | 1 in 42K | 18 | — | 1 |
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; Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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).
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- John Ferguson McLennanb. 1827GBBritish lawyer and ethnologist (1827–1881)
- John Cunningham McLennanb. 1867GBCanadian physicist (1867–1935)
- Jamie McLennanb. 1971CACanadian ice hockey player
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)17 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 8 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name McLennan mean, and where does it come from?
- Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Gille Fhinneain, a patronymic from a personal name meaning ‘servant of (Saint) Fionndn', a personal name representng a diminutive of fionn ‘white’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname McLennan?
- Mondonomo estimates about 3.6 thousand people named McLennan in Australia, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled mclennan. After it come United States, United Kingdom, Canada and South Africa; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name McLennan?
- In the United States, the national register counted 2,425 people named McLennan in 2010, about 1 in 137 thousand residents.
- How common is McLennan compared with other names?
- In Australia, McLennan is the 731st most common surname of 552,428 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about McLennan?
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/mclennanThe 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, “McLennan” — the 731st most common surname in Australia. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.