Some notes on the popularity of surnames
Also: a map showing how all roads lead to Rome.
Once, a few years ago, I was walking past a school in south London when I heard myself swear. This is a pretty odd reaction to the presence of a primary school, I’ll grant, but there was a reason: the name of the headteacher, listed on the sign at the gates. He was an Elledge.
If you’re called Jones or Jackson or Cohen or Khan, this is probably a feeling that’s not familiar to you: coming across someone who shares your surname isn’t that weird. But there simply aren’t that many Elledges: I don’t think I’ve ever unexpectedly encountered another outside my own family. I did arrange to meet one for lunch in Harrisonburg, Virginia, once (John Elledge III, an old-fashioned southern gent, and a Republican disgusted by what his party had become; you can read more about him in the Washington Post here). And a Hertfordshire teenager once DMed in excitement about having encountered another Elledge on Twitter, and for a while would occasionally message to ask my views about some political story or another (given both geography, and the fact my ancestors have been Londoners since at least the 1700s, I assume that both he and the headteacher were likely very distant cousins).
In the wild, though? Coming across an Elledge without warning? That triggered something akin to shock. Hence, the swearing.
Anyway, a few months back, during an argument with my partner about which of us had the less common surname, I came across the website Forebears, which collects data on the frequency and geographical distribution of names. And annoyingly, it turns out that she was right, and I was wrong. Apparently there are around 5,858 Elledges, making it the 82,691st surname in the world. My partner’s name, Frimston, is shared with only 106 other people, placing it 1,775,494th. Elledges, it turns out, are positively common.1
(Weirdly, there are also 13 poor souls who’ve been lumbered with the forename Elledge? Elledge Garcia, or some such. The name is apparently “most prevalent in the United States” – there’s an Elledge Lab, thanks to the sterling work of geneticist Stephen J. Elledge at Harvard – so I’m assuming we can blame the Americans for that.)
Anyway, that’s enough writing about myself poorly disguised as content: what you all clearly want to know is what are the most popular names that aren’t mine?
Helpfully enough, Forebears can tell us that too. (In a limited sort of way: so far as I can tell, it offers neither UK-wide nor Northern Ireland datasets, which perhaps raises some questions, but you work with what you’ve got.) Here are the 15 most common names in England:
1. Smith
2. Jones
3. Taylor
4. Brown
5. Williams
6. Wilson
7. Johnson
8. Davies
9. Patel
10. Robinson
11. Wright
12. Thompson
13. Evans
14. Walker
15. White
Source: Forebears.
A couple of things strike me about these figures. One is how unsurprising they are (this perhaps raises questions about whether they’re a good topic for a newsletter post, but we are where we are): who’d be surprised to find Smith and Jones in the top two slots?
Another is the relative frequencies. I’ve not included frequency data here because charts upset the email interface, but it’s included if you click through. Here’s the top 10:
There aren’t just more Smiths than Joneses. There are a lot more Smiths than Joneses, and vastly more than there are people of any other name. Over 1% of the entire population of England are Smiths.
Lastly, there’s the fact that the names which we could describe as “non-English” – Jones, Williams, Davies, Evans – are overwhelmingly Welsh. The only non-British name I can see there is Patel; next on the list seems to be Khan, at 40th, unless you count Lee at 37th, which we almost certainly shouldn’t. We’ll be coming back to all this.
Anyway, here’s the same data, this time for Scotland.
1. Smith
2. Brown
3. Wilson
4. Campbell
5. Thomson
6. Robertson
7. Stewart
8. Anderson
9. Scott
10. MacDonald
11. Murray
12. Reid
13. Taylor
14. Clark
15. Ross
Source: Forebears.
This time the names are more distinctively Scottish. Shocking, that. The other thing that strikes me is that the Welsh origin names are way down the list (Williams sneaks in at 99). So are the non-British ones. I can’t see any in the top 100.
Lastly, because it’d be rude not to and also because I had a dream recently in which I went to Swansea and it turned out to be this amazing world heritage site of a city which no one had ever bothered to tell me about, and also that it was legal to carry guns there; I blame Goldie Lookin Chain, though weren’t they actually from Newport?... Where was I? Oh right yes, sorry:
1. Jones
2. Davies
3. Williams
4. Evans
5. Thomas
6. Roberts
7. Lewis
8. Hughes
9. Morgan
10. Griffiths
11. Edwards
12. Smith
13. James
14. Rees
15. Owen
Source: Forebears.
Very little Scottish influence there, but very little English either, that I can see. I think what we’re looking at here is a story of migration flows, from the periphery to metropole: since at least the 16th century, it’s made sense for some Welsh people who want to get on to head to England; the same has been true for the Scottish for only a century or two less. But because the heart of Britain/the UK/the empire has always been in London, the flows have been relatively limited in the other direction.
At least, I think that’s what we’re looking at. Please do say if I’m wrong.
Oh, and the fact Patel is the common Indian name in Britain and America? It’s actually only the 19th most common surname there; the variant Patil is 21st (combined, if that were allowable, they’d be about 6th). The name comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “tenant of royal land” – village head, basically – and is mainly found in the northwestern state of Gujarat.
In other words, the frequency with which Patels are found in the west seems to be more about who emigrated, and possibly which Indian names westerners could pronounce or spell, than about the frequency they are found back in India. The three most common surnames there are Devi, Singh and Kumar. So: now we know.
But what about the most common names globally? When first playing with Forebears I had a lot of fun trying to guess the single most common name in the world, and I wouldn’t want to deprive you of the joy of putting names into the search box to see where they rank, so I’ve saved that chart for the very bottom of the email. Enjoy.
Map of the week
This week, an old classic. In 2015, Benedikt Groß and Philipp Schmitt, a couple of interns at Stuttgart urban design consultancy Moovel Lab, set out to explore the truth of the phrase, “All roads lead to Rome”. They took a grid of 26,503,452 square kilometres covering the whole of Europe and asked a computer to work out the shortest route to the Italian capital. Then they turned the results into a map, on which thicker lines represented more commonly-used routes.
The result looks rather like a tree, or perhaps a dendritic river system, with most of the traffic from Ireland going via the ferry to Holyhead, for example, then the entirety of the UK joining them to pile through the Channel Tunnel.
I’m not sure that it means anything, exactly – Rome has not been the place all roads lead to since somewhere upwards of sixteen centuries, which is an extremely long time – but it is extremely beautiful. A version of this in which you could immediately run a similar calculation for any point anywhere would offer some fascinating insights into which bits of the road network were trunks and which merely branches.
Such a project, alas, will not be coming from Moovel, which at some point in the intervening seven and a bit years seems to have closed its doors. But if you’d like to read more about how this map came into being, and see examples of similar projects – one covering the nine US cities named Rome, or one that connects points to an assortment of major European cities, say – you can find all that and more on Schmitt’s website here.
Anyway: the moment you’ve all been waiting for:
The 20 most common surnames in the world
Obviously, I was delighted to see what’s at number 1:
1. Wang
2. Li
3. Zhang
4. Chen
5. Liu
6. Devi
7. Yang
8. Huang
9. Singh
10. Wu
11. Kumar
12. Xu
13. Ali
14. Zhao
15. Zhou
16. Nguyen
17. Khan
18. Ma
19. Lu
20. Zhu
Source: Forebears.
In other words: 1 in every 68 people on this entire planet has the surname “Wang”. It means “king”.
Of these names, three are Indian, two Islamic2, one, slightly unexpectedly, Vietnamese; the other 14 are all Chinese.
Where does “Smith”, the most popular English-language surname appear in the global list? It slides in at 130th: it doesn’t even make the top 100.
In other words, what this data mainly tells us is quite how big the biggest countries in the world are.
Anyway, that’s number wang.
Self-promotion corner
The article above is an expanded extract from the archive of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, a weekly newsletter which goes out every Wednesday at 4pm. In this week’s edition, I asked whether the housing election had arrived at last; offered some notes on Australia’s big things; and wrote about a map of British cities, ranked by popularity.
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Agnes has asked me to include a footnote to the effect that, if anyone does know of other Frimstons out there, please don’t get in touch, she’s got quite enough family.
Actually, “Khan” was originally Turkic (central Asian) but, as in so many ways, Genghis has a lot to answer for.