[1] The personal name Michael is ultimately derived from a Hebrew name, meaning "Who is like God".
[2] In other cases, the surname is derived from the Middle English (Saxon and Anglian) words michel, mechel, and muchel, meaning "big".
In some cases, the surname was adopted as an equivalent of Mulvihill;[1] this English-language surname is derived from the Irish-language Ó Maoilmhichíl, meaning "descendant of the devotee of St.
As of 2014, 65.5% of all bearers of the surname Mitchell were residents of the United States (frequency 1:759), 12.0% of England (1:639), 5.6% of Australia (1:581), 5.1% of Canada (1:987), 2.8% of Scotland (1:261), 2.4% of South Africa (1:3,154) and 1.3% of Jamaica (1:309).
In Scotland, the frequency of the surname was higher than average (1:261) in the following council areas:[4] In the United States, the frequency of the surname was higher than average (1:759) in the following states: