Following up on my recent post with the most common first names in the Society’s armorial, here’s a list of the hundred most common last names registered to date.
It’s no surprise that last names are more diverse than first names, so this round up of the most popular bynames in the Society doesn’t have anything that rises to the level of Bill, Bob, Mike, and Tom found in my recent post.
Still, there are clearly some entries here that are relatively common, and it’s an interesting mix of types, including locative, patronymic, descriptive, and occupational bynames.
| of York | 89 | |
| MacLeod | 83 | |
| d’Avignon | 75 | |
| the Wanderer | 69 | |
| MacGregor | 63 | |
| Rose | 55 | |
| the Red | 50 | |
| Morgan | 46 | |
| of Skye | 46 | |
| MacDonald | 45 | |
| da Firenze | 44 | |
| de Lyon | 44 | |
| MacPherson | 42 | |
| Stewart | 41 | |
| du Bois | 39 | |
| Drake | 38 | |
| Cameron | 34 | |
| ap Rhys | 33 | |
| Sinclair | 33 | |
| the Black | 32 | |
| Bjarnarson | 32 | |
| Campbell | 32 | |
| Fletcher | 32 | |
| of Kent | 32 | |
| de la Mer | 30 | |
| Grey | 30 | |
| Gunnarsson | 30 | |
| von Bremen | 29 | |
| d’Anjou | 29 | |
| da Venezia | 28 | |
| Haraldsson | 27 | |
| Fraser | 26 | |
| de la Croix | 26 | |
| de Lacy | 26 | |
| de Montfort | 26 | |
| Ragnarsson | 26 | |
| of Atenveldt | 25 | |
| de Leon | 25 | |
| de Navarra | 25 | |
| Archer | 24 | |
| Buchanan | 24 | |
| de Calais | 24 | |
| Ruadh | 24 | |
| the Silent | 24 | |
| du Lac | 24 | |
| Gordon | 23 | |
| Thorne | 23 | |
| O’Connor | 23 | |
| Dragon | 22 | |
| Einarsson | 22 | |
| Gunn | 22 | |
| de Luna | 22 | |
| Ulfsson | 21 | |
| Dubh | 21 | |
| MacLachlan | 21 | |
| Magnusson | 21 | |
| Montgomery | 21 | |
| of Canterbury | 21 | |
| of Warwick | 21 | |
| de Grey | 21 | |
| de Navarre | 21 | |
| de Lorraine | 20 | |
| di Firenze | 20 | |
| Hrafnsson | 20 | |
| the Archer | 20 | |
| the Grey | 20 | |
| von Regensburg | 20 | |
| of Anglesey | 20 | |
| of Glastonbury | 20 | |
| of the Isles | 20 | |
| Olafsson | 20 | |
| MacKay | 19 | |
| MacRae | 19 | |
| al-Zarqa’ | 19 | |
| ap Morgan | 19 | |
| Blackthorne | 19 | |
| the Mad | 19 | |
| von Baden | 19 | |
| the Fair | 18 | |
| the Quiet | 18 | |
| Tremayne | 18 | |
| Tryggvason | 18 | |
| Winter | 18 | |
| Wolf | 18 | |
| MacKenzie | 18 | |
| O’Neill | 18 | |
| Peregrine | 18 | |
| Hawkwood | 18 | |
| de la Vega | 18 | |
| de Lyons | 18 | |
| dei Medici | 18 | |
| della Luna | 18 | |
| de Beaumont | 17 | |
| de Clare | 17 | |
| de la Rose | 17 | |
| de Valencia | 17 | |
| MacFarlane | 17 | |
| Martel | 17 | |
| Noir | 17 | |
| von Brandenburg | 17 |
(You’ll notice that I am grouping articles and prepositions with the words they accompany, which affects the rankings, as “Grey”, “de Grey” and “the Grey” are considered separate names, and people with bynames like “of the Endless Sea” and “of Tree Girt Sea” are counted separately rather than as sharing the common last name “Sea.”)
(And as with the previous batch, note that “last names” are not synonymous with “bynames,” both because of the pattern seen in some languages of double bynames, and because of the differing word order found in East Asian names where the personal given name often appears after the inherited family name or other bynames.)