The Census says that about 6. If your name does not turn up in a search here there were fewer than people reporting it in Names and data for the year are included for comparison so you can see if a name rose or fell in the rankings. Also included are percentages listed for each name for the four largest ethnic groups: Non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks or African-American, Hispanics of any race, and non-Hispanic Asians, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander.
An " S " appears where the percentages were suppressed for confidentiality. If the name you are searching for is contained within other names, those names will show up in a search as well we're working on that. Hyphenated names appear with out the hyphen, and names longer than 15 characters are truncated. Number of people 2,, People Per , population White percent Hundreds of years later this tells you that someone with the surname, Tailor or Taylor, had a ancestor on their paternal line who practiced that profession.
The earliest surnames in Western Europe grew out of existing methods of distinguishing people. Thus, a noble ruling from Savoy may have been known as Umberto de Savoy, a blacksmith may have been known as John le Smith and a bald man may be known as William the Bald; much in the same way we refer to people in similar ways today, such as John the Gob or Rachel the Bean Counter.
These names were not necessarily hereditary, but were dictated by circumstance. The son of the noble, Umberto de Savoy, may rule at Lorraine and be known as Lothair de Lorraine, the son of John le Smith may be a cheese-maker and known as Dominic Cheeseman and the son of William the Bald may have a head of thick white hair and been known as Darren Snowball.
Surnames only arose when families decided they were going to stick to a 'pseudo-surname''. This change occurred at different periods in different regions. For example, surnames were largely adopted between the 11th and 16th centuries in England, between the 16th and 19th centuries in Wales and between the 11th and 19th centuries in Scotland. Each family has to be taken on a case by case basis.
Though it is not possible to prove the origin of most surnames, it is possible to make educated guesses in some cases. A surname's origin is influenced by the progenitor's social class and the culture they lived in. Those of higher social status often took surnames that are uncommon today; whereas people of lower social status often took what are today common surnames. It is also clear that people of lower social status had less control over their surnames, no doubt handed to them by aldermen, lords and other authorities.
Thus we find numerous insulting surnames, such as Dullard, meaning a hard and conceited man. The majority of surnames are derived from the name of a male ancestor. These evolved from pre-existing non-permanent naming customs whereby an individual was identified by reference to a male ancestor or ancestors. Grimbald English: Henry son of Grimbald. One such man, Zhong Weihua, originally had a rare character in his name that wasn't registered in digital systems and font libraries -- meaning he couldn't open online banking accounts, sign up for phone plans, use online payment, or complete other everyday tasks, Xinhua reported.
Eventually, he felt he had no choice but to change his name to something more common. China's digitized ID cards made the problem even more pressing. The first generation of these cards allowed people to hand-write their names on -- but the second-generation cards, launched in and dubbed "smart cards" for their digital features, exclusively used computer-printed text.
A student scanning their second-generation "smart" ID card at an exam site in July in Nanchang city. Ma Cheng, a woman from Beijing, was one of those unable to receive a digital ID card due to her rare surname.
The character for "ma" in her name was particularly obscure; her grandfather had found it while looking through the dictionary, she told local media in Her first-generation ID card, with the character handwritten on, had expired -- but officials refused to grant her a second-generation card because the character wasn't in the government's computer database. They told her to change her name because it was "troublesome," she told the New York Times in But she was reluctant to do so.
For one, it would create a discrepancy between her ID card and other documents like her university diploma. Besides, she said, "I can't think of another, better name. How do you standardize a language?
Another factor exacerbating the increasing commonness of Chinese names is the government's efforts to standardize and regulate the language. Various dialects of Mandarin are spoken between the provinces, with some so different that speakers are unintelligible to each other.
Among these, the Beijing-based Standard Mandarin is the lingua franca -- and was formally declared the national spoken and written language in However, written Mandarin was not clearly standardized at the time, with discrepancies depending on factors like geographic region and population. So, agencies and experts set out to compile a list of characters they could agree on, and collectively use in the future. The result was the General Standard Chinese Character Table, published in and praised by the State Council as "a new starting point" for standardized Chinese.
It consists of more than 8, characters, which is just a fraction of the total number of Chinese characters in existence. Yet this regulated list of common characters was implemented across society in education and teaching, press and publishing, information processing, computer fonts, Chinese reference books, and more.
It also meant a smaller pool of characters that people were encouraged to choose from for their names. After the table was issued in , the Ministry of Public Security ordered local police departments to "limit the new names and changes in the population information management system to the General Standard Chinese Characters Table -- effectively solving the problem of computing rare characters in names," according to the Ministry. That declaration turned out to be premature. People faced issues of non-computable names long after the table was released -- one problem being the limited character database in computer systems across institutions and government agencies, which had forced Zhong Weihua to change his name.
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