Quotes About Surnames

You can tell who the Chinese are because they're the ones with the longest last names. That's because they felt that they had to 'out-Thai' the Thai and because the Chinese weren't allowed to take on Thai surnames that already existed

One of my lifelong hobbies has been to collect 'aptronyms' - the newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams's term for people whose names were curiously appropriate to, or provided ironic comment on, their occupations.

Many people nowadays have surnames that reveal their ancestors' fairy origins. Otherlander and Fairchild are two.

There were 212 people in Stockholm named Erik Eriksson, 117 named Sven Svensson, 126 named Nils Nilsson, and 259 named Lars Larsson

Norfolk has a long-standing reputation for inbreeding. As my son Sam used to say: "Norfolk: too many people, not enough surnames." I am not for a moment suggesting that the rumors are entirely true, but I will say that when the police do DNA checks after crimes they sometimes have to arrest as many as twelve thousand people.

In South Korea, some 20 million people share just five surnames. Every one of Denmark's top 20 surnames ends in '-sen,' meaning 'son of,' a pattern that is replicated across Scandinavia. British surnames have never favoured such neatness, and we can be grateful for that.

At the time that the sagas were written, however, names were not passed down in families, and recall that English surnames only came into being seven hundred years ago.

While Smith is, unsurprisingly, the most common name in England, any English surname that is held by at least ten thousand people is effectively a Smith-type name. (This includes the Kings, the Brays, and the Steads, for example.) No doubt, if surnames were just coming into general use now, Smith would be one of the rarer names, and we would perhaps be encountering more John Analysts, Jack Realtors, and Susan Hackers.

You can find virtually everybody black back as far as the 1870 census. Why 1870? That's when the ex-slaves first have surnames. But if you find your great-great-grandfather in 1870 and it says he's 50, that means he was born in 1820 and you're back to 1820 already. For an American that's pretty damned good, you know?

her classic work English Surnames, reasoning that it was a fairly