MacDonald

Macdonald, MacDonald, McDonald
Family name
Pronunciation	mɨkdɒnəld
Meaning	"Son of Dòmhnall"
Region of origin	Scotland/Northern Ireland
Language(s) of origin	Scottish Gaelic
Related names	Donald, Donald (surname), , MacDonnell (surname), Donelson, MacConnell, MacConnel, McConnell
Footnotes:

MacDonald, Macdonald, and McDonald are Anglicised forms of the Scottish GaelicMacDhòmhnaill or Dòmhnallach. The name is a patronym meaning "son of Dòmhnall". The personal name Dòmhnall is composed of the elements domno "world" and val "might", "rule". According to Alex Woolf, the Gaelic personal name is probably a borrowing from the British Celtic .

In the context of Scottish clans, the various forms of the name refer to one of the largest clans, Clan Donald.

In Scottish surname data, no distinction is made between, for instance, "Macdonald" and "MacDonald". According to this data, the following frequency information can be collated:

Frequency data from England of 1891 shows a concentration of families bearing the "Macdonald" surname in Lancashire and Yorkshire with a lower frequency in the northernmost counties, but overall widespread distribution throughout the country. "McDonald" shares the same pattern of distribution. Looking at contemporaneous data from the United States, coast-to-coast distribution of both "Macdonald" and "McDonald" appears in 1880. Looking back to 1840 in the United States, the prevalence of "McDonald" is far greater than that of "Macdonald", with concentration in the Ohio-Pennsylvania-New York corridor.

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Ambiguous human name pages

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