The name is Cloghvickree, an anglicisation of the Irish "Cloch mhic rí", which translates as "the stone of the king's son". It is the kind of name that raises more questions than it answers: which king, which son, and what connection, commemorative or otherwise, was once understood to exist between a royal figure and this particular stone.

The name appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, and again on the 1900 revision, where it is rendered in Gothic script, the convention cartographers used to mark antiquities and features of historical or traditional significance. That the name survived into both editions suggests it was recognised locally across at least six decades of the nineteenth century. The Ordnance Survey's first edition mapping project, carried out in the 1820s and 1830s, was notable for its efforts to record Irish place names, often consulting local informants to capture pronunciations and meanings that might otherwise have been lost. The fact that "Cloghvickree" was considered worth recording at all places the boulder within a tradition of named landscape features, stones that were understood to carry meaning rather than simply occupy space.