The "Kil" prefix, from the Irish "cill", denotes an early church site, and across County Clare such names mark places where Christian communities put down roots long before the medieval cathedrals and abbeys that tend to draw more attention. A graveyard persisting at such a location, often long after any associated church has crumbled or vanished entirely, is a common enough pattern in the Irish landscape, yet each one represents a thread of continuous use that can stretch back to the early medieval period.

Kilmaleery sits in the south of County Clare, a county whose terrain shifts between the bare limestone of the Burren to the north and the softer, more agricultural land closer to the Shannon estuary. Graveyards attached to early ecclesiastical foundations frequently remained in active use by local communities for centuries after the founding church fell out of use or was replaced, meaning the ground may hold burials spanning a very considerable stretch of time. The second element of the place name likely commemorates a saint or founder figure, a common feature of such sites across Munster, though the specific dedication here remains one of those details that local tradition sometimes preserves more reliably than the written record.