Sir, Name? Sir! Name!

April 30, 2016 9:31 PM

This website gives the meaning and distribution of millions of surnames all over the world. Plus, it suggests some interesting history about surnames.
posted by SpacemanStix (64 comments total)

Huh. Ethiopia has the highest incidence and prevalence of my very English sounding surname? THAT I didn't expect.
posted by taff at 9:42 PM on April 30, 2016

Except that Engstrom means narrow stream. Eng is the northern European for narrow. So England is narrow land.
posted by Oyéah at 9:42 PM on April 30, 2016

Huh, I grew up with three people who have exceedingly rare surnames--one is a variant of a Czech surname, one is reportedly Hessian but extinct in the Deutschophone sphere, and one seems like to be equally English, French, Dutch and Flemish but only exists in the United States.
posted by infinitewindow at 9:51 PM on April 30, 2016

I avoid using my name online as much as one possibly can these days, so forgive me for not spelling it out.

When my family moved to Australia they had to change their surname because the first syllable was pronounced 'arse'. Primary school me thanks them for this. So I entered the old spelling, and as I knew already, they're all Swedish. Except for one mysterious Kenyan.
posted by adept256 at 10:00 PM on April 30, 2016

My name says:
BICHART: Agnes Bichart in Dundee, 1628 (James Bichart was charged with abstracting multour of come, 1672 (Corsehill, p. 106).

What does that even mean?
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:03 PM on April 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

There are apparently about 2,000 people in the US with my surname. Which is more than I'd expect, but still about twice as many people than in the country the surname actually comes from. My family's name was changed when moving to the US though, so trying to draw any connection between the two results in a giant puzzle of confusion to where half of the people with my name aren't related to me and most of the other half have weird spellings that aren't picked up in their variants. Trying to trace genealogy from it is almost impossible.
posted by downtohisturtles at 10:20 PM on April 30, 2016

multour ; come (n)
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:20 PM on April 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think 'come' here is a misprint of 'corne', being the grain that would be ground at a mill and subject to the payment of multure (but which James allegedly made off with, instead).
posted by notquitemaryann at 10:24 PM on April 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Apparently my surname "may be extinct".
posted by northernish at 10:49 PM on April 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Clearly we need to arrange a captive breeding project for you as soon as possible.
posted by Segundus at 11:04 PM on April 30, 2016 [17 favorites]

We have a long lost tale of a distant great uncle going to Australia and never being heard from again. My maiden surname is prevalent in the USA, UK and a surprising handful down under. I guess my relative did pretty well for himself!! Great website.... My dad, who is so into our fam history, is going to love this!! Thanks!
posted by pearlybob at 11:17 PM on April 30, 2016

We're #1,615! We're #1,615! (In the USA, that is.)
posted by SisterHavana at 11:21 PM on April 30, 2016

My surname really sucks for this sort of thing:

1,159,324th most common
surname in the world
Approximately 114
people bear this surname
posted by lollusc at 11:22 PM on April 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Huh. Ethiopia has the highest incidence and prevalence of my very English sounding surname? THAT I didn't expect.

It could just be one person who moved there and had large numbers of descendants. When we looked into our genealogy in the 1980s there were only people of my surname in Scotland and New Zealand, and one small family in the USA. Then when we found that family on Facebook in the early 2000s, all four of the kids were young adults who were getting married and having their own kids. And now they've all had large families, and the USA has the highest number of people with our surname at all. In another few generations that might be all there is, as the NZ-based ones are not generally having kids.
posted by lollusc at 11:27 PM on April 30, 2016

The map indicates that there are 7 people in Canada with my last name. 3 of them are flying to Japan tomorrow, so that should decrease the population of us substantially for a couple of weeks.

I'd really like to know who the two I'm not related to are.

Actually, I'd hazard to guess that the two I'm not related to are actually just bad data showing some of us more than once.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:06 AM on May 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Apparently Hubbell is the 57,002nd most common, with 8,177 people sporting it.

Local. From Hubba, a Danish chief, and hill—Hubba's—hill or Hubhill. Hub means a heap or a lump, and may indicate a small round hill on the summit of another.

I feel like that describes me pretty well.
posted by brundlefly at 12:07 AM on May 1, 2016

I am rather surprised how few of my Mom's maiden name show up, and I get the impression that a fair amount of them in the US are my relatives being double-counted from cross-country moves.
posted by ckape at 12:12 AM on May 1, 2016

4000, give or take a few and boy, could we have a whiter name! UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and apparently one in Chile because... they got lost.

Of course, that's my dad's name. My mum's however, is much more interesting #patriarchy
posted by AFII at 12:29 AM on May 1, 2016

The most common surname of all is 'Wang', apparently.
posted by Segundus at 12:45 AM on May 1, 2016

Huh.. my grandmother's surname, Gloege, I always presumed to be Danish, as she was from Denmark, but apparently all 281 of the people bearing this name, at least on record, are in the US. Weird. I wonder if they are distant relatives.
posted by cj_ at 12:48 AM on May 1, 2016

Apparently my last name means "unkempt," which, after my day on the dirt track and night at the speedway, is remarkably apt.
posted by mollymayhem at 1:04 AM on May 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

For anyone interested in names in the Netherlands, there's the Database of Surnames in The Netherlands, which shows distribution of family names in the Netherlands in 1947 and 2007, as well as some information about the meaning and/or origins of many names.
posted by bjrn at 1:27 AM on May 1, 2016

Rank in Nation: #2

Damn... so close.
posted by humboldt32 at 1:31 AM on May 1, 2016

Uh. Engstrom, originally Swedish: Engström, totally means meadow by the river. Alternative spelling of Äng.
The "North European" [languages, many such, in fact] is [are] in fact a bunch more varied than the rather eng, uh, narrow vocabulary of the Germans.

This site is still improvable. My surname isn't listed.
posted by Namlit at 1:55 AM on May 1, 2016

@oyeah England is Englaland, land of the Angles, those being a Germanic tribe.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:15 AM on May 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

The definitions seem pretty random. It claims my surname means glade, an open space in a wood. It actually means a grove, a small wood. Might be useful if I have to look up antonyms, I guess.

Uh. Engstrom, originally Swedish: Engström, totally means meadow by the river.

River by the meadow, even. But the one in the database is apparently a similar-looking name from Connecticut :-)

(And according to their database, Engstrm is the most common spelling of Engström in Sweden. Not entirely sure the people behind this website are qualified to do what they're doing...)

(For people who want more reliable information, I'd recommend ancestry.com as a first stop, at least for anyone from an area that's seen noticeable emigration to the US.)
posted by effbot at 3:12 AM on May 1, 2016

Thomas Topham was mayor of Ripon in 1627, and Christopher Topham, merchant, was lord mayor of York in 1660.

York represent! Low level managers and functionaries for 400 years now.
posted by Meatbomb at 3:30 AM on May 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

The family were subdivided at an early period; and the head of one branch assumed the epithet of the [name] Roe, or the "Bed-haired," while the other was known as the [name] Don, or the "Brown-haired."

My name dates back over a thousand years and I can still clearly see which branch I'm decended from (if by "bed-haired" they meant "Robert Plant without product" which I'm sure they did)
posted by billiebee at 3:45 AM on May 1, 2016

My paternal grandfather's came in at #5158 worldwide; there's almost 106K of us, the vast majority not-unexpectedly in Germany. (Definition: 'peaceful ruler'..... snicker.)

My other lines' names were much rarer: one shows 517 people worldwide, three-quarters of them in Chile (how'd that happen?!? Somebody get lost?), and others mostly in the US and Russia. Another has 52 people, split between the US and Hungary. And my maternal grandfather's name didn't even come up --- wonder if we just can't spell?
posted by easily confused at 4:23 AM on May 1, 2016

I have recently been strangely fascinated with visiting Gibraltar. I've just learned that Gibraltar is the nation with the greatest concentration, percentage wise, of people with my surname.

(The origins are not a mystery - it's a village in Yorkshire. And it's a name that also tends to get used for butlers in random English-set comedies a lot, too, including Tim Curry's character in CLUE, so it's clearly English like whoa.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:34 AM on May 1, 2016

I'm huge in Barbados, apparently.
posted by leotrotsky at 4:51 AM on May 1, 2016

Both my and my husband's names appear in greater numbers in the US than in their counties of origin, but his by only a few people (its uncommon in both America and Italy but it means magician, so that's awesome) and mine by several orders of magnitude. The Scottish diaspora was no joke apparently. It's a very Scottish last name (it's a place name, there are dukes and duchesses of ____) and Scotland is like #10 on the list, after the US, Canada, South Africa and basically the entire rest of the commonwealth.
posted by soren_lorensen at 4:53 AM on May 1, 2016

I think this website is grossly undercounting a lot of names. It says there are 33 people in the world with my surname, which I'm sure must be inaccurate. Of these 33, none are in Canada, so I guess I don't exist?
posted by crazylegs at 4:56 AM on May 1, 2016

My dutch last name is the 6th most common in Pakistan and the 2nd most common in Iraq.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 5:12 AM on May 1, 2016

My overtly Hungarian surname either has a Portuguese twin or they have a diacritical problem.

(Also, I'm having mixed feelings about their Brexit link. I'm kind of assuming it was a banner I ad-blocked, but who knows.)
posted by hoyland at 5:29 AM on May 1, 2016

Interesting! My Dutch surname is, the way it's spelled (with a Y), most common in South-Africa. I had no idea.
The version with a I is most common here in the Netherlands, but that's not how my family spells it. Maybe I should people who have trouble spelling it right that it's spelled the Afrikaans way...
posted by Too-Ticky at 6:03 AM on May 1, 2016

The problem with my surname is that is actually comes from two very different spots: it's a place name in Norfolk and also the typical shortening of a German Jewish name into English. (Not everyone shortened it, and the typical Israeli shortening is different to account for Hebrew's different rules about word forms.)
posted by jeather at 6:34 AM on May 1, 2016

There is exactly one person in my state with my name. I wonder who it is!
posted by rlk at 6:53 AM on May 1, 2016

This confirms what I'd always heard, which is that my surname is most densely clustered on the Isle of Man. In fact, about two weeks ago I received a postcard from their tourist council inviting me to consider a vacation to my ancestral home. I guess they are tracking down addresses for everyone with the same surname to boost tourism. It's not a bad idea. There are only 21,000 of us, mostly in the US, England, Australia, Canada, and South Africa, as you might expect.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:57 AM on May 1, 2016

I really want to see the list of the top surnames in the world. What's the most common surname?? I tried guessing a few, but the highest I could get was "Li," ranked #4 in the world.
posted by aka burlap at 6:57 AM on May 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Hmmm, less than 10,000 people in the world with my surname. I've only met one outside of my family.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 7:17 AM on May 1, 2016

My surname really sucks for this sort of thing:

1,159,324th most common
surname in the world
Approximately 114
people bear this surname

I take a contrary view; mine is:
769,651st most common
surname in the world
Approximately 242
people bear this surname

I thought that was kind of cool; I had always thought my name was British, and the derivation indicates that it is from England, but currently exists only in the US. With numbers that small, it was easy to see how accurate their data is. The numbers in east Georgia correspond pretty well (but not exactly) to my immediate family. Texas? Of course, that is where the bulk of my paternal relatives are from. A few in Colorado? Oh yeah, I have a couple of cousins and their families there. Not why there are so many with my last name in California though, although there is an actor with the same last name in IMDB.

It looks like the historical background they give is the same for a whole bunch of similar names, which makes sense given the scope of the project, but seem like a potential source of errors. And if there are over 11 million names in their database, I wonder what the approximately 10.2 million names with less than 242 people are. I am guessing there are a bunch with only one person. I wonder what kind of info they have on those names?
posted by TedW at 7:21 AM on May 1, 2016

It looks like the historical background they give is the same for a whole bunch of similar names, which makes sense given the scope of the project, but seem like a potential source of errors. And if there are over 11 million names in their database, I wonder what the approximately 10.2 million names with less than 242 people are. I am guessing there are a bunch with only one person. I wonder what kind of info they have on those names?

They came up with like 20,000 people with my surname and no information. Like all genealogy stuff in English, I suspect there's a strong bias towards surnames common in a handful of countries and tough beans to the rest of us.
posted by hoyland at 7:34 AM on May 1, 2016

It would be cool if you could do other searches on their data. I wonder what name is most common? Playing around, it looks like Chang is 68, far ahead of Smith or Jones. But its variant, Changh, is down in the 5 millions, with only 2 people. How do they rank what seem to be millions of names with one or two people? I need to poke around the whole site some. How do they compare to Ancestry.com for genealogy research? I have been wanting to look into my family background and see how much of the family lore is true. (Although my Chickasaw Indian background is already well documented, unlike all those Cherokees out there.)
posted by TedW at 7:45 AM on May 1, 2016

Okay, just tried a variant of my maternal grandfather's name: it comes back as of Scottish origin; 692 people in the world have it, with most of those in the US. The fun part: population 'density' is greatest is.... Palau?!?
posted by easily confused at 7:45 AM on May 1, 2016

Oh, and I see they don't have any information on Chang even though it is so common; that seems to betray a certain bias in their data.
posted by TedW at 7:48 AM on May 1, 2016

This came up with 189 people worldwide with my surname, about 86 in the US and 78 in Canada, 22 in England and 4 in Australia. 189 actually sounds a little high for mine but hey, maybe. It's a pretty distinct and rare name. I know the 189 is only an approximation from available data, but there aren't many of us. I suspect nearly everyone with this name is related within the last 150 years at most.
posted by azpenguin at 7:49 AM on May 1, 2016

There are likely less than 16 people in the world with my last name and probably less than 30 even if you include soundalikes. We may be lots of things but numerous is not one of them.
posted by tommasz at 8:10 AM on May 1, 2016

Gillescop mac camby witnessed a perambulation of the lands of Kinblathmond in 1227

He went for a walk? Wait. He witnessed a walk. Of the lands. I'm going to assume they mean the same thing, though if this ancestor actually saw a chunk of real estate moving about that would be something.
posted by rodlymight at 8:15 AM on May 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

My somewhat uncommon surname came to the US from England and had thousands and thousands of babies, apparently. And is another one popular in Barbados!


Huh.. my grandmother's surname, Gloege

I think I might know one of these folks, actually. Or at least something very close.
posted by Squeak Attack at 8:39 AM on May 1, 2016

Oh, and I see they don't have any information on Chang even though it is so common; that seems to betray a certain bias in their data.

It is a co.uk domain, and it seems to be a UK-based site....
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:58 AM on May 1, 2016

It's like a time machine: there's my family in one state and my brother and I are children; there we are at college in other states; whoa, my brother's kids are born in that state! Over there are his kids growing up and getting jobs in other states!
posted by acrasis at 9:07 AM on May 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

As the one who shared this, I feel like it's one of those things that's a pretty good idea in theory, but perhaps not the greatest execution in terms of posting data.
posted by SpacemanStix at 10:00 AM on May 1, 2016

I have another very rare surname. I'd be very surprised if the stated figures for the US (2) and Canada (11) were correct; I think they've made some move-based mistakes, and that the numbers are actually 1 and 3 respectively.
posted by tangerine at 11:31 AM on May 1, 2016

In their list of most common surnames in The Netherlands "Den", "De" and "Van" are listed as distinct surnames, (though those are 'tussenvoegsels'), so at least for Dutch surnames something's gone wrong with their data.
posted by Ms. Next at 12:53 PM on May 1, 2016

I'm not sure how terribly accurate this is, at least with the aggregate number of people bearing a name. I put in my wife's Japanese maiden surname. It's an uncommon surname in Japan, to be sure, but according to this site there are only 17 people with it in Japan. I know that many just in her family, so that number is almost certainly way too low.
posted by zardoz at 2:43 PM on May 1, 2016

105,412th most common surname in the world
Approximately 3,924 people bear this surname
Most prevalent in: United States
Highest density in: Guyana
posted by govtdrone at 5:56 PM on May 1, 2016

There are only 159 people in the world with my surname. There are only 46 of us in Canada. I am probably related to most of them. If you combine my very unusual last name with my not very common first name, well, there's only one of us in the world.

This is why I don't put my real full name on very many things that don't require it...there's zero plausible deniability that it's not actually me whenever my exact name pops up.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 7:02 PM on May 1, 2016

Me, too, hurdy gurdy girl. I'm the only one. But they estimate only 78 people have my last name, so pretty much everyone who has it is the only one with that combination.

Hell, as far as I know, I'm the only one in my county with my very rare first name.
posted by monopas at 8:19 PM on May 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

All I know is those fuckers at Ellis Island forced my grandfather to choose a different one of his four names because there were "too many" people here in the US who had his surname.

I'll never change my surname back, but I still hate those fuckers for making him do that.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 8:49 PM on May 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

There's something really off with the Nguyen surname. There are about 36 million people bearing this name in Vietnam and another 2 millions overseas (source = number of Vietnamese people x 40%) but there are only 640,000 Nguyens according to the website.
posted by elgilito at 12:49 AM on May 2, 2016

I'm curious to know if all 35 of us have the same first name.
posted by sixpack at 8:48 AM on May 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Ellis Island changed my great-grandfather's very uncommon Italian surname into what is apparently a fairly uncommon Polish surname

Fuckin Ellis Island
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:34 AM on May 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

My people apparently spent a lot of time killing and being killed by royalty. Sheesh, royals, am I right? You assassinate one of them, one time....and suddenly you're the bad guys for a hundred years.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 10:06 PM on May 2, 2016 [2 favorites]