McNeely

surname · Latin script

Meaning: from Scottish Gaelic Mac an Fhilidh, ‘son of the poet’; or Irish Gaelic Mac Conghaile, ‘son of Conghal’

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

/məkˈniɫi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

McNeely is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 29K(measured from records)
  • CACanada≈1 in 33K
  • GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 50K

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

China (inferred from the name graph)

≈51,000 people, est.

2 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
385 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 11K (inferred from the name graph)

Iceland, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

McNeelyLatin(measured from records)
МакнилиCyrillic(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)

from Scottish Gaelic Mac an Fhilidh, ‘son of the poet’; or Irish Gaelic Mac Conghaile, ‘son of Conghal’

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

McNeely 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.

Where McNeely is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
CN China≈51,000 est.≈1 in 27K—McNeely4
US United States11,3501 in 29K11KMcNeely385
GB United Kingdom≈1,300 est.≈1 in 50K—McNeely72
CA Canada≈1,200 est.≈1 in 33K—McNeely116
IT Italy≈1,100 est.≈1 in 56K—McNeely6
IE Ireland≈180 est.≈1 in 29K—McNeely22
IS Iceland≈33 est.≈1 in 11K—McNeely2

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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

McNeely is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Spanish surname4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian

    Also written Mc-Neely

43 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

McNeely 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.

  • Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac an Fhilidh ‘son of the poet’.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • Anglicized form of the Connacht name Mac Conghaile ‘son of ConghaV (see Connolly).

    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)

18001850190019502000Thompson W. McNeely, b. 1835Marian Hurd McNeely, b. 1877Clifton McNeely, b. 1919Matthew McNeely, b. 1920Big Jay McNeely, b. 1927Phil McNeely, b. 1932Jim McNeely, b. 1949Joel McNeely, b. 1959Joshua McNeely, b. 1994

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)

FormalDear Mcneely,
InformalHello,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 10 sources across 2 countries.

Official registers attesting McNeely
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201011K#3,183
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200011K#2,941
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202011K#3,314
US United Stateswru 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 McNeely mean, and where does it come from?
from Scottish Gaelic Mac an Fhilidh, ‘son of the poet’; or Irish Gaelic Mac Conghaile, ‘son of Conghal’ Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
How do you pronounce McNeely?
A machine transcription gives /məkˈniɫi/ (IPA) for English.
In which country does McNeely have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 51 thousand people named McNeely in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled McNeely.
How common is the name McNeely?
In the United States, the national register counted 11,350 people named McNeely in 2010, about 1 in 29 thousand residents.

What do you want to know about McNeely?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/mcneely

The 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, “McNeely”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how McNeely parses inside a full name →