Tuesday, December 23, 2008

What's your name again?

Here's a fun little website I ran across awhile back.  You enter your surname in the search box and it tells you where in the world you can expect to find that name and approximately how many people live there with that name.  Probably not totally accurate, but pretty cool nonetheless.  For example, I'm of Japanese descent, and I thought my name was very, very rare.  At least in the U.S., it is.  However, in Japan, there are approximately 3,600 people with my surname -- I guess out of 128,000,000 it is still pretty rare.  In the website's terms, it's 28 fpm (frequency per million).  In comparison, a name like Suzuki, one of the most common, comes out at 12,900 fpm.

Give it a try at publicprofiler.org.

By the way, my surname's frequency in the U.S.?  0.04 (about a dozen of us - most of whom I don't even know)

1 comment:

alisonwonderland said...

i know five of those in the U.S. with your last name!

my last name is most common in the U.K., with about 1800 fpm in the U.S.