Long — Irish Surname Origin & Meaning
Irish form: Ó Longáin
Meaning: 'descendant of Longán'
Traditional stronghold: Cork
Pronunciation: long; Irish Ó Longáin: oh LUNG-aw-in
History of the Long name
Irish Longs are mainly Ó Longáin, a County Cork sept whose homeland lay in the mid-Cork parishes around Canovee and Moviddy, though English and Norman settlers named Long, from le Long, the tall, also settled in Leinster and Ulster towns. The Cork family holds an honoured place in Gaelic scholarship: the Ó Longáin scribes of Carrignavar, above all Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin and his sons, copied and preserved hundreds of Irish manuscripts through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Seosamh Ó Longáin lithographed the great facsimile of the Leabhar Breac for the Royal Irish Academy. The name remains most numerous in Cork.
Variants: Longan · O'Longan
Famous bearers of the name
- Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin — Cork scribe, poet and United Irishman, central figure of a famous manuscript-copying family.
- Naomi Long — Belfast politician, leader of the Alliance Party and former Lord Mayor of Belfast.
Related names from the same part of Ireland: Murphy · O'Sullivan · McCarthy · Daly · Collins · Flynn · Healy · Casey