Tiernan
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Transferred use of the Irish surname, Gaelic O Tighearndin ‘descendant of Tighearnan’ (A concise dictionary of first names)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 13 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Tiernan is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 2,552 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010.
- IEIreland≈1 in 12Kfew records(inferred from the name graph)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 50K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 62K
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)
- Record sources
- 292 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 12K (inferred from the name graph)
2,552 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Ireland, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Transferred use of the Irish surname, Gaelic O Tighearndin ‘descendant of Tighearnan’. The latter is a diminutive of tighearna ‘lord’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- A concise dictionary of first names
Often considered alongside
Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Tiernan, most often first. They share a style rather than an origin.
From the names suggested together in public name-advice forums, in English. A list of what people consider, not a measure of how common any name is.
Where the surname Tiernan is found
(measured from records)Tiernan 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 | — | 2,552 | 1 in 130K | 2.6K | Tiernan | 292 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈1,100 est. | ≈1 in 62K | 1.1K | Tiernan | 117 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈540 est. | ≈1 in 50K | 1 | Tiernan | 85 |
| IE Ireland | #867 | ≈440 est. | ≈1 in 12K | — | Tiernan | 77 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈350 est. | ≈1 in 118K | 1 | Tiernan | 48 |
2,552 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; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender. 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)Tiernan 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, Irish Gaelic; descendant of a lord
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
Irish: Anglicized form of the Gaelic name Ti(ghe)arnán, originally a byname representing a diminutive form of tighearna lord.
as a word
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)- Mike Tiernanb. 1867USAmerican baseball player (1867–1918)
- Andrew Tiernanb. 1965GBBritish actor
- Greg Tiernanb. 1965IEIrish-Canadian animator and director
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)29 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 13 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Tiernan mean?
- Recorded meaning: Transferred use of the Irish surname, Gaelic O Tighearndin ‘descendant of Tighearnan’.
- Where does the name Tiernan come from?
- Transferred use of the Irish surname, Gaelic O Tighearndin ‘descendant of Tighearnan’. The latter is a diminutive of tighearna ‘lord’. Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names.
- How common is the name Tiernan?
- In the United States, the national register counted 2,552 people named Tiernan in 2010, about 1 in 130 thousand residents.
- How common is Tiernan compared with other names?
- In Ireland, Tiernan is the 867th most common surname of 73,729 surnames recorded there.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Tiernan?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 2.6 thousand people named Tiernan, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled tiernan. After it come United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland and Canada; the country table on this page ranks them.
What do you want to know about Tiernan?
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/tiernanThe 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, “Tiernan” — ranked 9234th in the United States (Census Bureau, 2010). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.