Kathleen
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Form of Katherine closely identified with Ireland; from Spanish Catalina, Old French Cateline, and Middle English Catlin
A female name· listed as female by the registers that count names by sex
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 50 countries · latest register: Antigua & Barbuda ABEC Voter Registration Roll (2026), 2026
Kathleen is a female given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country, where it is the 65th most common given name.
- AGAntigua & Barbuda≈1 in 200(inferred from the name graph)
- IEIreland≈1 in 310
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 370
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Kathleen itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. 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)
- #163 (measured from records)
- 5 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 606 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 204 (inferred from the name graph)
547,321 people, 2020
of 15M given names, spellings grouped
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Antigua & Barbuda, 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)Form of Katherine closely identified with Ireland; from Spanish Catalina, Old French Cateline, and Middle English Catlin.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Irish first names
Attested across 10 languages in the etymology graph.
Often considered alongside
Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Kathleen, 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 in the world
(measured from records)Kathleen 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 | #65 | 547,321 | 1 in 608 | 547K | Kathleen | 606 |
| GB United Kingdom | #78 | ≈190,000 est. | ≈1 in 366 | 4 | Kathleen | 293 |
| CA Canada | #81 | ≈86,000 est. | ≈1 in 480 | 1 | Kathleen | 295 |
| PH Philippines | #423 | ≈70,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.7K | listed | Kathleen | 165 |
| AU Australia | #106 | ≈46,000 est. | ≈1 in 586 | 92 | Kathleen | 246 |
| IE Ireland | #43 | ≈17,000 est. | ≈1 in 309 | 23 | Kathleen | 120 |
| NZ New Zealand | #83 | ≈13,000 est. | ≈1 in 408 | 11 | Kathleen | 127 |
| AG Antigua & Barbuda | #1 | ≈460 est. | ≈1 in 204 | 3 | Kathleen | 4 |
547,321 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. 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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; NRS — Baby names Scotland full list (1974–present); NSW BDM — Popular baby names (1952–present); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present); DIA — Baby name popularity (1900–present); the ag-abec-voter-roll-2026 register. 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)Kathleen is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Swedish, Se Katarina.
as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon
In English, Irish Gaelic; a battle ruler
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
Irish and English: Anglicized form of Gaelic CAITLÍN . Variant: Cathleen .
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)- Audrey Hepburnb. 1929GBnot in their usual nameBritish actress (1929–1993)
- Nina Simoneb. 1933USnot in their usual nameAmerican singer, songwriter and pianist and civil rights activist (1933–2003)
- Joanne K. Rowlingb. 1965GBnot in their usual nameEnglish author (born 1965)
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)A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence
(measured from records)84 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 50 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Kathleen mean, and where does it come from?
- Form of Katherine closely identified with Ireland; from Spanish Catalina, Old French Cateline, and Middle English Catlin. Recorded by Irish first names.
- What are other forms of the name Kathleen?
- In the etymology graph, Catherine, Katherine and Kathryn are forms of the same name in other languages.
- Is Kathleen a male or female name?
- Kathleen is a female name. National registers that list it by sex list it as female: United States (Census Bureau, 2020), Brazil (IBGE, 2022), France (INSEE, 2024) and Norway (SSB), among others.
- Which countries have the most people named Kathleen?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 547 thousand people named Kathleen, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kathleen. After it come United Kingdom, Canada, Philippines and Australia; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Kathleen?
- In the United States, the national register counted 547,321 people named Kathleen in 2020, about 1 in 608 residents.
- How common is Kathleen compared with other names?
- In the United States, Kathleen is the 65th most common given name of 2,815,431 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Kathleen?
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/kathleenThe 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, “Kathleen” — the 65th most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.