Where Do Surnames Come From? Trades, Fathers, Places and Nicknames

Nearly every English surname, and most European ones, falls into one of four groups:

• •Occupations: Smith, Wright, Taylor, Baker, Miller, Cooper, Turner, Fletcher, who made arrows, Chandler, who made candles, and Webster, a female weaver; Smith leads because every village needed one and the name was given to the man rather than the trade
• •Patronymics, the father's name: Johnson, Williams, Robertson, Davies, the Welsh ap Rhys that became Price and ap Hywel that became Powell, and the Scandinavian -sen and -son; the Welsh fixed their surnames last, in the eighteenth century, which is why so many are the same few first names
• •Places: a village, Lincoln, Preston, Washington, or a feature, Hill, Wood, Brook, Ford, Atwood, and the Norman de and French style that gave names such as Sinclair and Beaumont
• •Nicknames: Brown, White, Long, Short, Armstrong, Young, Wise, Goodfellow, and the less kind ones that died out or were changed

A by-name became a surname when it passed to the children whether or not it fitted them, and that happened where and when records needed it. The Norman aristocracy brought hereditary names from France after 1066; the poll taxes of the fourteenth century, the manorial rolls and the parish registers ordered from 1538 required every person to be listed under a name that stayed the same, and a clerk who wrote John Smith once wrote it for the son. In Europe the fixing ran from Italy in the tenth century to Scandinavia in the nineteenth and Turkey in 1934, when a law required every citizen to adopt one, and Ataturk, father of the Turks, took his from the state. Jews in the Habsburg lands and Germany were compelled to take fixed surnames around 1800 and were sometimes charged for good ones, which is where the Goldbergs and the Rosenthals come from.

The four sources are general, but the order of names and the way they are inherited are not. Chinese surnames, about a hundred of which cover most of the population, come first, are among the oldest fixed surnames in the world at over two thousand years, and are the reason there are ninety million Wangs. Icelanders use a true patronymic, Gudrun Jonsdottir being the daughter of Jon, and the telephone directory lists people by first name. Spanish and Portuguese names carry both parents' surnames, father's then mother's in Spain and the reverse in Portugal; Russian names carry a patronymic between the given name and the surname; and in much of the Islamic world a chain of the father's and grandfather's names served until colonial and modern states required a fixed one. Married women in England took their husband's name by a custom that the law never quite required and that is now optional; in Spain and Korea they never did.

A map of surnames is a map of the past. Names that come from a single place, Featherstonehaugh or Kirkbride, are still clustered near it seven centuries later, and genetic studies find that men with a rare surname often share a Y chromosome, which is inherited along the same line. Occupational names record an economy of smiths, wrights and millers with no engineers or programmers; the distribution of Smith, Schmidt, Ferrari, Herrera, Kowalski and Kovacs across Europe is the blacksmith in a dozen languages. The names also record migration and its pressures: the Americanisation of Mueller into Miller and Schneider into Taylor at the docks and in the schools, the Jewish and Italian names shortened for the telephone, and the enslaved people of the Americas given or taking their owners' names, which is why Washington is one of the commonest surnames among Black Americans and rare among white ones.

About 45,000 surnames are in use in Britain and most are held by a handful of families; the top hundred cover a third of the population and Smith, Jones, Williams, Brown and Taylor lead as they have for centuries. New names are still made, by immigration, by hyphenation, by choice, and the naming systems are converging as bureaucracies demand a first name and a last name in two boxes, which does not fit an Icelander, a Javanese with one name or a Spaniard with two. The description that became a name is still being read: a person called Fletcher is asked, once in a life, whether their ancestors made arrows, and the answer is yes, one of them, seven hundred years ago.

Surname origins are traced by finding the earliest written forms, often in medieval tax rolls, court records and charters, and the early spelling frequently reveals a meaning the modern one hides. Wood can mean someone who lived by a wood, but in some cases it comes from a Middle English word meaning mad or wild, making it a nickname. Names such as King, Bishop and Pope rarely descend from real kings or bishops; they usually began as nicknames for someone with a lordly manner, or for a person who played that role in a pageant or festival. Guessing from the modern word alone is how false stories start.

Another widely repeated story is that immigration officers at Ellis Island changed the names of new arrivals to simpler, American-sounding ones. Historians of immigration say this is largely a myth. Passenger lists were drawn up at the port of departure, and officials at Ellis Island checked arrivals against those lists, often with interpreters, rather than writing names down afresh. Most name changes happened later and were made by the immigrants or their children, to fit in, to find work or to be spelled more easily. The result, a German Schneider becoming Taylor, is real, but the choice was usually the family's own.

Before most people could read and write, a surname was spelled however the clerk heard it, and the same family can appear in records as Smyth, Smythe and Smith, sometimes within one document. Even the literate were relaxed about it: the six signatures generally accepted as William Shakespeare's use several different spellings, none of them the modern one. Spellings settled only when mass literacy, printed directories and official registration made people write their names the same way again and again. In England and Wales civil registration of births, marriages and deaths began in 1837, and from then on the form a family used tended to stick.

Spelling variants also feed a popular misconception about Scottish and Irish names. Many people believe that Mac marks a Scottish name and Mc an Irish one, but both mean son of in Gaelic, Mc is simply an abbreviation, and both forms are found in both countries. The Irish O' comes from a Gaelic word meaning grandson or descendant, so O'Neill and O'Brien point back to a more distant ancestor than a MacDonald does. The Norman French Fitz, from fils, meaning son, did the same job in names such as Fitzgerald, carried to England after 1066 and to Ireland with the Norman invasion a century later.

How varied surnames are depends on history. In England and the United States, Smith is the most common surname, but it is carried by only around one per cent of people. In some East Asian countries a handful of names cover a large share of the population: in South Korea about one person in five is called Kim, and Lee and Park are also very common.

In Vietnam, Nguyen is often said to be borne by around four in ten people, partly because people historically adopted the surnames of ruling dynasties. China has a population of over a billion but a relatively small set of common surnames, with Wang, Li and Zhang each held by many tens of millions. Shared names can make records and banking more complicated, which is why full names and dates of birth matter so much there.

European surnames were by-names that became hereditary between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries as tax rolls and parish registers needed a fixed label, drawn from four sources: a trade, a father's name, a place or a nickname, which is why Smith, Johnson, Hill and Brown lead the lists. Other cultures fixed theirs earlier, as in China, or later, as in Turkey, or never, as in Iceland's patronymics, and the names still map where families came from, what their ancestors did and how they moved.