What’s in a name?
A website has gone viral offering to unlock the history of your surname, tracing its origin and showing you how many people share the same name.
Forebears.io also shows you how many people in each country share the same name.
Taylor Swift’s surname apparently originates from Cambridgeshire woman Matilda Swyft in the 13th century, and was often given to couriers. According to the site, approximately 58,000 people share the same surname.
Perhaps the most famous surname in the world, Kardashian, is held by 501 people in the world. Most of them live in the US.
Amusingly, there are 115 people – 27 of whom are British – who have Flintstone as a surname.
Studies have documented the effect surnames can have on individuals.
The peculiar incidence of nominative determinism in regards to names stems from a 2002 paper in which researchers suggested individuals were likely to “choose careers whose labels resemble their names (for example, people named Dennis or Denise are over-represented among dentists).”
Two years ago, a study suggested social mobility may be more heavily dependent on names than we previously thought: researchers trawled the Oxbrigde records and found a certain family names had appeared on the rolls for 27 generations.
