Shaughnessy
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from Irish Gaelic O Seachnasai, ‘descendant of Seachnach’, a personal name
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ˈʃɔnɪsi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Shaughnessy is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 54K(measured from records)
- DKDenmark1 in 391K
- SESweden1 in 785K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 18 (measured from records)
- 1 in 54K (inferred from the name graph)
6,117 people, 2010
Reference-verified
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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)
from Irish Gaelic O Seachnasai, ‘descendant of Seachnach’, a personal name. The rest of the page continues the note in the source, but the surname entry is this Irish patronymic.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Shaughnessy 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 | 6,117 | 1 in 54K | 6.1K | Shaughnessy | 18 |
| DK Denmark | 15 | 1 in 391K | 15 | — | — |
| ES Spain | 14 | 1 in 3.6M | 14 | — | — |
| SE Sweden | 13 | 1 in 785K | 13 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | 5 | 1 in 1.7M | 5 | Shaughnessy | 1 |
6,117 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames). 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)
Shaughnessy 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, Irish Gaelic; the stately one; boy/girl.
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
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 Shaughnessy, 1st Baron Shaughnessyb. 1853USAmerican-Canadian railway administrator (1853-1923)
- Clark Shaughnessyb. 1892USAmerican football player and coach (1892–1970)
- Mickey Shaughnessyb. 1920USAmerican actor (1920-1985)
- Ed Shaughnessyb. 1929USAmerican jazz drummer (1929–2013)
- Dan Shaughnessyb. 1953USAmerican sportswriter
- Charles Shaughnessyb. 1955GBEnglish actor
- David Shaughnessyb. 1957GBBritish-born theatre and television director, producer and actor
- Meghann Shaughnessyb. 1979USAmerican tennis player
- Joe Shaughnessyb. 1992IEIrish association football player
- Conor Shaughnessyb. 1996IEIrish association football 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)
Attested in 20 sources across 10 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 6.1K | #5,672 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 6K | #5,310 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 6K | #5,592 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 15 | #29,952 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 14 | #101,339 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 13 | #34,247 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 5 | #101,952 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Shaughnessy come from?
- from Irish Gaelic O Seachnasai, ‘descendant of Seachnach’, a personal name. The rest of the page continues the note in the source, but the surname entry is this Irish patronymic. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Shaughnessy?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈʃɔnɪsi/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name Shaughnessy mean?
- Recorded meaning: from Irish Gaelic O Seachnasai, ‘descendant of Seachnach’, a personal name.
- In which country does Shaughnessy have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 6.1 thousand people named Shaughnessy, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled shaughnessy.
- Where is Shaughnessy most common?
- Shaughnessy is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 54 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Shaughnessy?
- In the United States, the national register counted 6,117 people named Shaughnessy in 2010, about 1 in 54 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Shaughnessy?
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/shaughnessyThe 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, “Shaughnessy”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.