Regan is a name — one of the three daughters of King Lear in Shakespeare's play King Lear. At the start of the play, the old king asks his daughters to say how much they love him, and promises to divide his kingdom according to their answers. Regan and her older sister Goneril give beautiful, flattering speeches they do not mean, and get the land. The youngest, Cordelia, refuses to perform her love in words, and gets nothing. Once Regan has what she wanted, she treats her father coldly and then cruelly: she shuts him out of her house in a storm, and she stands by while her husband blinds the old Earl of Gloucester. Later the two sisters fall out over the same man, Edmund, and Goneril poisons Regan. So in English writing, the name carries a meaning beyond the person. To call someone a Regan, or to mention Regan and Goneril together, is to point at a child who says loving words to a parent for what they can get out of it, and turns hard the moment the money is theirs. That is the connection an educated English reader hears. As an ordinary name, Regan is also a real Irish surname and a modern given name for either a boy or a girl, with no Shakespeare in it at all — that is only in the play. Note the spelling: one 'a', and it is not Reagan, the American president's name.