Chiefly a Scottish place-name, Cunninghame in Ayrshire, brought by Plantation settlers — though occasionally also an anglicisation of the unrelated Gaelic Ó Cuinneagáin.
Mixed Origin · Root meaning ‘from Cunninghame, Scotland’
Cunningham is most often a toponymic from Cunninghame, a district of Ayrshire, carried into Ulster by Scottish Plantation settlers from the early 1600s onward. Separately, and less commonly, it was also used to anglicise Ó Cuinneagáin, an unrelated Gaelic name found in Sligo and Fermanagh.
A Scottish district's name, mostly, though not always — worth saying honestly rather than picking the tidier single story.
Irish form: Ó Cuinneagáin
