FakecreditcardReal surnames, local spelling
Every name on the list is a family name that is genuinely common where it comes from, written the way people there write it: Müller and Schröder with umlauts, Rodríguez and Gonçalves with accents, Wiśniewski with Polish letters, Turkish Yıldız with a dotless ı, Vietnamese Nguyễn with its tone marks, Japanese names such as Satō in Hepburn romanisation and Chinese names in pinyin. That makes the generator useful in two very different ways: writers get believable names for characters from a specific place, and developers get names that exercise their code properly.
Choose one of 20 countries or one of six more origins — Ireland, Poland, Russia, China, South Korea and Vietnam — or All origins for a mix. Without the two-surname option every name appears at most once per list; the line above the results shows how many surnames the selection holds.
How surnames differ around the world
| Pattern | Examples | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Occupation | Smith, Müller (miller), Schneider (tailor), Ferrari (smith), Kowalski (from kowal, smith) | England, Germany, Italy, Poland |
| Patronymic: “son of” | Johnson, Hernández, Fernandes, Jansen, Ivanov, McCarthy (Irish and Scottish Mac) | English-, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, the Netherlands, Russia, Ireland, Scotland |
| Descent from an ancestor | O’Brien, O’Sullivan, O’Connor (Irish Ó, “descendant of”) | Ireland |
| Place or landscape | Hill, Brooks, Van Dijk (of the dike), Yamamoto (base of the mountain), Tanaka (in the rice field) | England, the Netherlands, Japan |
| Two surnames | García López, Hernández Martínez, Silva Santos | Spain and Latin America (father’s then mother’s), Brazil and Portugal (usually mother’s then father’s) |
| Particles | van der Berg, de Jong, von Weber, da Silva, dos Santos | Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, Portugal |
| Adopted by law | Yılmaz (“undaunted”), Kaya (“rock”), Demir (“iron”) | Türkiye, where the 1934 Surname Law required every family to take one |
| Few, very common surnames | Kim, Lee, Park; Wang, Li, Zhang; Nguyễn, Trần, Lê | Korea, China, Vietnam |
| Often no inherited surname | A single name, or the father’s given name | Indonesia and parts of South India: the Indonesian list mixes common family names and second names |
The most common surnames
In the United States the Census Bureau’s surname list (from the 2010 Census) ranks Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Garcia, Miller, Davis, Rodriguez and Martinez as the ten most common surnames. Worldwide, the Chinese surnames Wang, Li and Zhang are each carried by roughly 90 to 100 million people, according to China’s household registration statistics. Concentration varies enormously: Kim is the surname of about one South Korean in five (21.5% in the 2015 census), and estimates put Nguyễn at around 38% of Vietnamese people, while Müller, the most common surname in Germany, is carried by well under 1% of Germans. Keep that in mind when you pick names for characters or test data: three Kims in a Korean office is realistic, three Müllers in a German one is not.
Choosing a surname for a character
- Match the setting. Pick the country or origin of the character’s family, not only where the story happens — an Irish-American detective in Boston can be Brennan or Kavanagh.
- Mind the era. Two-surname Spanish names, Turkish surnames (only since 1934) and Indonesian single names all depend on time and place.
- Vary the sound and length. Avoid giving two main characters names with the same first letter or rhythm; filter by letter to find alternatives.
- Check famous names. Search the full name before you publish, so your villain doesn’t share a name with a well-known real person.
Surnames that break software
Family names are where many forms fail. Use the generator to collect test cases for these rules, then check your validation, sorting and display:
- Apostrophes and hyphens: O’Brien, O’Sullivan, Smith-Jones. Filters that reject
'and-lock real people out, and unescaped apostrophes still break naive SQL. - Spaces and particles: van der Berg, da Silva, García López. Is the name sorted under V or B? Does “capitalise each word” turn it into “Van Der Berg”?
- Diacritics and special letters: Müller, Wiśniewski, Yıldız, Nguyễn. They need UTF-8 storage end to end, and case conversion of the Turkish ı and İ is notoriously tricky.
- Very short names: Li, Ma, Ha, Oh. Minimum-length rules of three characters reject millions of people.
- Length and case: two joined surnames easily pass 30 characters, and automatic “Title Case” gets McDonald, MacLeod and DiCaprio wrong.
Need first names too? The random name generator combines given and family names by gender, and the fake identity generator builds a complete person around the name.
Frequently asked questions
Is a surname the same as a last name?
Yes. Surname, last name and family name all mean the inherited part of a name. “Last name” is misleading in cultures that put the family name first, such as China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Hungary, which is why many international forms now ask for a “family name”.
Where do the surnames come from?
We compiled the lists ourselves from family names that are common in each country or origin — 40 to over 80 per list. Surnames are shared by many people and not owned by anyone, so you can use them freely in fiction, games, tests and products; just avoid combining a first and last name into a famous real person’s name.
Why do some lists run out of names?
Each surname appears once per list unless you tick Two surnames, so a request for 200 names from a list of 60 returns 60. Pick All origins, another letter or the two-surname option for a longer list.
How are two surnames joined?
The way people in that country do it: with a space for Spanish, Mexican and Brazilian names (García López, Silva Santos) and with a hyphen in English-, German-, French- or Polish-speaking countries (Smith-Jones, Müller-Schmidt). Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, Türkiye and Indonesia don’t use compound surnames, so those lists stay single.
How do I get a last name that starts with a certain letter?
Choose the letter in Starts with. Letters with accents count as their base letter, so Ö finds Öztürk under O and Ś finds Śliwa under S. If nothing matches, switch to All origins.