Irish surnames starting with W

The W names in brief

• Wall · de Bhál · Norman
  Du val — 'of the valley'. Norman knights 'of the valley' who held Dunmoylan and Coolnamuck; Wall officers filled the Irish Brigades of France and Spain — one, Ricardo Wall, ran the Spanish Empire as chief minister.
• Wallace · de Bhailís · Norman-Welsh
  Le waleis — 'the Welshman, the foreigner'. The same name as Scotland's William Wallace, planted in Ireland by the Normans. Waterford's William Vincent Wallace ran away to sea, hunted whales, and wrote Maritana — the most performed Irish opera of the 19th century.
• Walsh · Breathnach · Norman-Welsh
  'the Welshman' — soldiers who came with the Normans. Breathnach simply means the Welshman, and Woulfe is blunt about what that implies: it is a descriptive surname applied generically to the early Anglo-Norman invaders who came here from Wales, so there are naturally many distinct families of the name and no common ancestor at all. They became utterly Irish, the Walsh Mountains in Kilkenny carry the name, and it is now one of the most numerous surnames in the country.
• Ward · Mac an Bhaird · Gaelic learned family
  Son of the bard. Hereditary poets, the name literally means 'son of the bard', who versified for O'Donnells and O'Kellys. Every English-speaking Ward carries a Gaelic job description.
• Watters · Mac Uaitéir / Ó hUisce / Ó Fuaruisce · Gaelic septs & Ulster settlers
  'son of Walter' (Mac Uaitéir) — or, for the Gaelic septs, names built on 'uisce', water: 'descendant of the water' (Ó hUisce), 'cold water' (Ó Fuaruisce). A name with two quite different roots. In Ulster it is usually Mac Uaitéir, 'son of Walter', brought by Scottish and English settlers.
• Whelan · Ó Faoláin · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Faolán, 'little wolf'. Heirs of the Déisi princes of Waterford, whose ancient kingdom the Normans took first. The name, wolf-cub, remembers older, wilder centuries.
• Wilson · — · Ulster Scots / English
  Son of Will. Carried by Lowland Scots settlers of the 17th-century plantations, now among the most common names in Ulster — one strand of the island's braided story, and a US president's ancestry (Woodrow Wilson's people left Strabane).
• Woulfe · de Bhulbh · Norman
  Le woulf — 'the wolf'. Norman wolves of Limerick and Kildare: one line gave Wolfe Tone his surname via his godfather, another gave the language its great surname-dictionary (Fr Patrick Woulfe, 1923).