How common is my surname?

Thanks to this little online app I now know that there are 3,385 people in England & Wales who share my surname (McEwan). I was surprised to find that there are nearly twice as many people with the alternative spelling of McKeown.

The ten most common surnames in England & Wales on this dataset are:  SMITH, JONES, WILLIAMS, TAYLOR, BROWN, DAVIES, EVANS, THOMAS, WILSON and JOHNSON. Given that the population of Wales is far smaller than that of England this clearly demonstrates the concentration of Welsh family names.

A few directed searches then revealed there were 419 people who are burdened with the surname of Daft and 31 with the surname Slapper!

Which reminds me of a story ... I worked for BT back in the early 90's whilst I was studying for my Masters. Back then they more or less had a monopoly on fixed line telecoms. Twice a week I used to sit in a dreary open plan office for 14 hours at a time taking customer complaints to their "151" fault line. On one excrutiatingly quiet Bank Holiday afternoon I rather childishly searched their vast customer database for names that contained any one of a number of expletives or pejoratives. Strangely I found that the database always returned the same woman! Apparently she was the ex-wife of one of the engineers. He had entered a series of pseudonyms into the database alongside her name (slapper, cow, whore etc.) and if you searched for them, up she popped! Nice.

Picture Credit: Spell with Flickr