Breen
An Irish surname, most often treated as a reduced form of O'Brien or related Gaelic names built on a personal byname.
The #2,549 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 21,789 Americans shares it.
Etymology
The name is usually explained in Irish Gaelic terms. Some 19th-century writers connected Breen with O'Breen/O'Brien forms and with the Gaelic personal name element braon or a related ancestral byname, while others treated it as a shortened surname form used after the loss or reduction of the prefix O'. In Manx and Irish materials it also appears as Mac Braein / Mac Breen in related surname families, showing that the name was not always a simple one-line derivation.
History
The name is strongly associated with Ireland, especially Ulster and Kerry in the historical tradition preserved by early surname writers. Lower repeats a local tradition that one branch of the O'Neill kindred, after being displaced to Kerry, adopted Breen as a safer name. The surname is also recorded in Manx sources and in later forms such as Mac Breen, which suggests a wider Gaelic family of related spellings and derivatives.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
A 20th-century Manx source notes that a related form, Creen, was once used on the Isle of Man but later disappeared there.
From the historical record
“Jamieson. BREEN. ^TlKn in 1607 Hugh ONeill, earl of Tyrone, went into voluntary exile, the government of James I. wished to dis- place his adherents from Ulster, in order to introduce an English colony there. One of the seven native septs thus dispossessed were banished to the distant county of Kerry, where, to…”
— Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom