A new analysis released by the Census Bureau reveals that two Hispanic surnames – Garcia and Rodriguez — have cracked the top 10 most common. This, I assume, will send The GOP Base over the edge.
The top 10 U.S. surnames
1. Smith (881 occurrences per 100K people)
2. Johnson (688)
3. Williams (569)
4. Brown (512)
5. Jones (505)
6. Miller (418)
7. Davis (398)
8. Garcia (318)
9. Rodrigues (298)
10. Wilson (290)
The NYT has an interactive chart where you can plug in your surname to see where it ranks. Spaulding is #1774 on the list, between Diehl and Ernst. Where's your name?
Smith — which would be even more common if all its variations, like Schmidt and Schmitt, were tallied — is among the names derived from occupations (Miller, which ranks No. 7, is another). Among the most famous early bearers of the name was Capt. John Smith, who helped establish the first permanent English settlement in North America at Jamestown, Va., 400 years ago. As recently as 1950, more Americans were employed as blacksmiths than as psychotherapists.In 1984, according to the Social Security Administration, nearly 3.4 million Smiths lived in the United States. In 1990, the census counted 2.5 million. By 2000, the Smith population had declined to fewer than 2.4 million. The durability of some of the most common names in American history may also have been perpetuated because slaves either adopted or retained the surnames of their owners. About one in five Smiths are black, as are about one in three Johnsons, Browns, and Joneses and nearly half the people named Williams.
…More than 96 percent of Yoders, Kruegers, Muellers, Kochs, Schwartzes, Schmitts and Novaks were white. Nearly 90 percent of the Washingtons were black, as were 75 percent of the Jeffersons, 66 percent of the Bookers, 54 percent of the Banks and 53 percent of the Mosleys.
58 Responses to “The browning of Top 10 surnames”
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Mine was not among the 5000 most common names last year.
Nor was mine, due to its unusual spelling. But the more common spelling was in the top 20.
912 and falling. Down 172 places in the last 10 years.
Nope, not among the top 5000.
Me neither.
Number 7!!! W00t!!
I had no idea my last name was so common. Huh.
I’m still planning on dropping it and going by my first and middle names when I graduate from college, though.
8. Garcia (318)
9. Rodrigues (298)
Anyone remember the old, ancient Dennis Leary routine?
“I got three words for you, White America: Como Esta Usted?”
I thought that the people at Ellis Island misled my great-grandpa Moshe or that he was other confused when he decided that our name in this Goldene Medina should be Snyder rather than Schneider. But looking at the chart it seems that Snyder (144) really is more common than Schneider (272) … hmmm …
Anyway, my name is way too common (and increasing in how common it is — somebody’s gotta do somethin’ ’bout all them Germanic hordes pouring into our country and threatening to disrupt our Anglo-Protestant tradition with weird foods like sauerkraut and fussnugge and bizarre belief systems from outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition(TM) like Catholicism, Lutheranism and Judaism!
), which makes publishing an issue (you know how many people have my same first and middle initial AND last name?). Oddly, my fiancee’s name, which I thought would be pretty common — it is of Scottish origins (when I asked her about her last name and she replied “it’s Scottish” — I immediately appreciated the whole Chef is from Scotland thing on South Park at a new level 
) — isn’t even on the top 5000 (maybe the issue is that it has about 15 variant spellings — although hers is the most common — so if all of her extended family could agree on how to spell the name, maybe it’d crack the top 5000?). So maybe I should change my name when we get married? I would so be doing that if I hadn’t already published under my current name!
I love that little etymology of names. My grandmother who just died had a maiden name of Brouwer, Dutch for Brewer. She may have been anti-acohol, but somewhere back in the family they weren’t
My surname is uncommon in Italy, let alone the US, which causes plenty of issues with pronunciation, spelling, and unintentional rhyming with my first name.
I feel like a limerick.
Marcotte is not on the list.
Mine is still in the top twenty.
My last name is not on the list, but my husband’s is at #52. Damn Irish.
My maiden name is #1748 on the list, which surprises me a little (I expected it to be lower, honestly.). My married name, on the other hand, is number 75. The close spelling varient, for which it is often confused is #133, actually less common, which startled me because everybody and their sister adds that blasted ’s’ to the end.
Pico is not on the list, nor were any variants of Perriera, my great-grandfather’s surname before he changed it, due to there being so many Perriera’s on Maui.
I went from a 1924 to 3594 when I got married- expected it to be the other way around!
Haha, my last name is there! And so are the last names of all my Asian friends. Pretty cool.
Neither my old last name nor my new one were on the list. That’s an interesting list, though.
Mine is 13th and has fallen 3 spots since 1990. Which means it used to be top ten. But then again, I recall my folks telling me that it was fifth mist common in the US Army during WWII, so it is falling all the time.
None of the last names that I have used (my maiden name, my married name, or my husband’s actual last name before he legally changed it) are on the list. I didn’t expect the last two to be on it, as the husband is of South Asian origin and I took a shortened form of his name when we got married, but I expected mine to at least be there someplace–it isn’t all that uncommon.
haaa mines #4 and my sisters is#1
I must be lucky; mine is 777. I feel like doing my Sean Connery impression as I say “Yes, the name’s Jean; Blue Jean.”
Mine’s in the mid-300s, which surprised me, particularly given how often people mispronounce it.
It’s also become quite a bit more common, but that could have something to do with the fact that it’s a common name in two ethnicities, and I don’t think it’s my ethnicity that accounts for the change.
I read some brilliant comments over at Kevin Drum’s post on this subject about how some of those “Hispanic” names weren’t really attached to “Hispanic” people because they are common in the Philippines, and therefore “Asian” people have them, too.
Listen, kids–there are people who are both “Hispanic” and “Asian” at the same time! Because race is totally fucking made up. Not that complicated.
I read some brilliant comments over at Kevin Drum’s post on this subject about how some of those “Hispanic” names weren’t really attached to “Hispanic” people because they are common in the Philippines, and therefore “Asian” people have them, too.
One of the things I noted about Pam’s list is that it seems to me to use the Portuguese spelling of “Rodrigues.” Usually, I see “Rodriguez” for Spanish-speakers (but that might just be because I live in a city with a large Brazilian population)
Was Rodrigues/z combined in ways that, say, Schmitt and Schmidt, may not have been?
I’m not on there — but if I truncate it to Roche, then I’m 2053.
Of course, the original is from the north of England, and the truncated version is Portuguese or Spanish — I think! — which explains why I get all that Brazilian spam in this address, but not my other one.
One of the things I noted about Pam’s list is that it seems to me to use the Portuguese spelling of “Rodrigues.”
Yeah, but this vaguely racial category of “Hispanic” or “Latino/a” that we’ve made up in the U.S. doesn’t seem to make these kinds of distinctions. It’s used to describe people who don’t speak Spanish (i.e. are from Brazil or French Guiyana or Portugal) and therefore can’t be reasonably called “Hispanic,” and people who don’t even speak Latin-root languages (i.e. people from Belize, the U.S. and indigenous South/central Americans) and therefore can’t be called “Latino.”
Could Zuzu’s last name be “Bush” (#346)? The mind boggles.
DAS- Snyder’s one of my last names and indeed, we’re getting awful common. We could imagine it being the oncoming Germanic hordes, but I blame my cousins.
And as to the commonality of your name- your initials are the same as my father’s (in fact, I spent many months reading the comments here cheerfully imagining that it was my da writing your comments) and if your first name is David…
As for my other last name, not even on the list.
Rufustfyrfly,
Um, I get the constructed nature of race. I teach it. Howver, there are distinctions between Spanish and Portuguese languages, and the way they spell things, including names.
Neither my current nor previous surname makes the top 5,000. I kinda like it that someone Googling my name will actually find stuff about me (makes ego-surfing easy)—and I kinda don’t like that I can’t hide among the other people with the same name, because such people don’t seem to exist.
Amanda, I went to high school with a kid named Scott Marcotte.
My maiden name, nor my mother’s maden name is on the top 5,000. . . oh well these German names have never been really popular. My ex-husband’s name is #49, my husband’s name is #665
Tommy T is probably hopping mad that Tafoya, Garcia, Mondragon, Herrera, Hernandez, Lopez, Gonzalez, Perez, Sanchez, Ramirez, Flores (Florez) etc. are not only more popular than his name, they are on the up swing.
My last name, as far as any of us know, belongs to only two families in the entire United States. We’ve been in occasional contact with them once or twice over the last 20 or 30 years, but none of us has ever been able to find a verifiable blood or marriage link between the two families.
Low 200’s. My maiden name wasn’t even in the top 5000.
My name ranks in at 4497. Just above Lung and Steadman. It’s dropped 818 slots since 1990. 3 people in 100,000 are Sparrows.
My bithname rates at 389, just above Fitzgerald and Doyle.
And not all Garcias are brown.
I happen to know a very red-headed freckled one. She married into it.
Mine is nowhere near the list, considering that I know how basically everyone in America with my last name is related to me. With the possible exception of the elk caller.
Since there are maybe 30* of us in 300 million, that’s a frequency of 0.01 per 100,000**, or two orders of magnitude below the cutoff for the list in the article.
*Descended from my grandfather or his brother, with a few cousins who immigrated after my great-grandfather.
** There really ought to be a unit of “per person”, so that I could say 0.1 micro[unit]. Perhaps the Jefferson [Jf] after the first supervisor of the US Census?
The German spelling of my last name isn’t on the list. However, the English translation is #4645.
Yeah, I’m up there, but surprisingly behind my wife’s name. I’m surprised she even beat out Wong… she has a (sort-of) Chinese last name, but with the spelling they use it’s common to some other groups. Like the Scottish, for instance.
Mine’s just plain Irish, and everybody asks if I’m related to some farming family out in Newton (which I’m not). When I give the spelling I always say it’s “as in Randy Macho-Man Savage” and refuse to hear anything about Fred Savage, though I don’t mind comparisons to Dan Savage. Certainly don’t like that there’s some conservative pundit type who’s named Matthew or Michael Savage. Sullying a fine name, that one is.
The Spanish surnames that made the top 20 account for a fairly large proportion of Mexicans, at least. The chances that a given Latino will be Martinez, Rodriguez, Garcia or Lopez is pretty high. It’s my impression that Swedes, Chinese and Koreans also share a shortage of surnames.
Sweeney is just above 600 on the list, but people still ask me what kind of name it is. The best was when a co-worker asked me if I knew any Harry Sweeneys. I tugged at my beard and replied that almost all of us were hairy.
#4912, down 972 spots in 17 quick years. In danger of falling out of the Top 5,000.
You gotta go way back in my family to find any names that are in the top 5000. Neither my name nor my wife’s are in it. Nor are my mother’s maiden name nor her mother’s maiden name. Neither of our paternal grandmothers’ maiden names are in the top 5,000. As it turns out, however, both of our maternal grandmothers make the cut: my gram’s maiden name is in the mid-600s; her grandmother’s maiden name is in the mid-800s.
I know my last name is extremely rare. That’s why I changed my last name with the marriage, actually. When you’ve put up with more than a lifetime of people misspelling and mispronouncing Henry (for the sake of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, how much simpler could it be?) having a name I didn’t mind people stumbling over was a relief.
When you say Krummenacker, you’ve said a mouthful.
I wasn’t able to find the “interactive database;” I downloaded an Excel spreadsheet. “Foxwell” is in row #26201, next to a “rank” of 26191, and the number 878 which it shares with many neighboring names–I wonder if _that_ is the “rank” y’all get from this database you speak of.
Anyway, pretty far down there–but just a bit above “Puzio”, Mario nonwithstanding apparently.
Not surprisingly, my surname isn’t in the top 5000. It’s a pretty rare German name, and the spelling of it may not even be the way it was originally.
Mom’s maiden name, however, is in the 700s, and her mother’s maiden name is in the 1500s.
Mine’s not among the top 5000, no surprise. I doubt it would make the top 5000 in Italy, which is where it’s from.
I ran through the name of twenty friends of mine, and only eleven of them have names in the top 5000. Interestingly, of the set of twenty friends, seven were non-white, and six of those seven were among the eleven who were represented in the top 5000. I’m not sure whether that means: presumably some permutation of (a) my list is whiter than the national average, (b) my white friends disproportionately come from obscure corners of southern and eastern Europe that didn’t send that many immigrants to America, or (c) there’s a relatively greater diversity of European last names in the U.S.
if your first name is David… - Sunburned Counsel
Oy Gevalt! Do I have a kid I don’t know about?
My first name is indeed David!
See what I mean about my name being common?
Interestingly, echoing comments made by others, even though Snyder is far more commen than Schneider(*), everybody wants to spell/pronounce my name as Schneider and can’t handle the spelling of Snyder, which regularly gets mispelled as Synder … even on official documents!
I keep telling people to remember, that I am “more snide”, therefore my name is Snyder. Now I wish at Ellis Island they decided to spell the name Snider — it would somehow seem appropriate
(*which was how our name was pronounced in die Alte Welt … it was not spelt in Latin letters, though — my family is largely from the Jewish component of the Germanic hoardes that settled in Eastern Europe before coming here … anyway, no-one in our family were Schneiders by profession … I wonder if somehow our name was changed in the old-world as well? it would make sense that our name, when Jews were told to finally get with the program and take last names, must have been Schmieder given that we were blacksmiths).
Most of the names in my ancestry did not make the top 5000. My last name is Polish & only has about 100 non-related people in the US and Canada. None of the other Polish names made it either. My maternal grandmother’s name showed up, by her mother’s did not. My mother’s father’s name wasn’t there, neither was his mother’s name. I only know the names back to great-grandparents.
If I ever decide to do a family tree, this should make it easier.
My last name isn’t there. However, the most common mispronunciation of my name sneaks in at 4,876. This surprises me because I am aware of (though have never met) strangers with my same last name, but have never, ever even heard of anyone with the mispronunciation.
It also makes me feel a little more special. Like maybe my family really is descended from the 10 brothers of family lore and that’s why there aren’t that many of us.
ps - regarding Rodrigues/z - the Times has it with a z - could it be a typo rather than a massive influx of Brazilians who have failed to rouse the ire of those who get upset about this sort of thing?
Thinking it over, I guess my reaction - feeling special to not be on the list - is really white. For people descended from immigrants who arrived more recently (or whose numbers have increased greatly in the last few decades), being on the list is an affirmation that they are just as American as the Smiths or the Jones. For those white folks who aren’t on the list (and pleased not to be), not being on it affirms that we aren’t as generic as we might have feared.
I kept my own name when I married for a variety of reasons, but a little piece of it was that I didn’t want to trade in my unusual name for one in the top 15.
Mine is not in the top 5000.
My husband’s is 445.
Twenty four hundred and some-odd. I’ve never heard many of the surnames in the same neighborhood of the list, although I’m still more common than the seemingly widepread “Donohue.” Hmm.
“O’Shea” gets in there at 3529.
I think even more interesting than Garcia and Rodriguez making the top 10 is how many Hispanic names are in the top 30 - 7, by my count. I think that speaks to the fact that it’s not because those two are incredibly common Hispanic surnames, but that really is a larger presence of Hispanic/Latino families in America.
My name is in the top 20. Big surprise! I was thrilled when I met a black person with mylastname. (I’m white). My thinking is that my family aren’t just euro-mutts, after all. But then I realized it was probably a slave name. *sigh*
My name goes way back, and is so common I share it with a soap opera character and a very famous actress (and her brother).
I’m sure you can figure it out.
oops. I meant in the 20’s.
My odd Sicilian name isn’t in the top 5000, which doesn’t surprise me.
I didn’t make the top 5000.
Freepers have to be even more ballistic about trends like this (picked a few names from Wikipedia)
Ahmed: 1206 in ‘00 from 3288 in ‘90, +2082
Ibrahim: 3786 from 6434
I’m a little confused as to what the constructed nature of race has to do with Hispanic surnames. Naming conventions are cultural constructs, too, which hew closely to the cultural constructs of race/ethnicity … so calling Garcia a Hispanic name is accurate.
My last name is not in the top 151,672. Well then. On the other hand my first and middle names are both in the top 10.