McCabe (surname) most common surname, and "MacCabe" was ranked 43,031st. For the 2000 United States Census neither surname ranked among the top 1,000 most common surnames. McCabe (surname) The surnames McCabe and MacCabe are Scottish and Irish surnames. They are Anglicisations of the Gaelic Mac Cába, a patronymic name meaning "son of "Cába"". The nickname or personal name "Cába" is of uncertain origin. The surname can be written in modern Scottish Gaelic as MacCàba and MacCaibe. Patrick Woulfe considered that the surname was possibly derived from a nickname, meaning "a cap", or "hood". Henry Harrison suggested the name was from the Gaelic
Mac and Mc together example has been taken as representative of a possible paradigm. A book on filing rules from 1918 gives an example showing Mc and M' treated as abbreviations, i.e. for Mac, and ordered as if in the expanded version; and a similar book from 1922 makes the rule one of a number that apply also to St. (Saint) and Mrs. (Mistress). A 1938 book that is a comparative study of cataloguing in various British libraries regarded Mac + Mc + M' sorting as an example of achieved "standardisation" in alphabetisation. It gave further examples where, it argued, such standardisation would be