
The most popular last name in every country in the world, and what they mean - shrikant
https://matadornetwork.com/read/popular-last-name-every-country-world-means/
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ganeshkrishnan
"Devi" can't be the most popular last name in India. Lots of Indians have the
place of birth as last name or fathers name (eg Sundar pichai or vishwanathan
Anand) with no last name technically

Devi is sometimes used as filler name just like kumar.

I would assume real last names like shah or Patel or aggrawal to be more
popular

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manishsharan
You are right. Devi is an Salutation mostly used in North India to address
women just like you would use Ms. or Mrs. to address a woman in English. For
example Mrs Jane Smith addressed in Hindi would be "Jane Devi"

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jimmydef
"Over 723,000 people, or one in eight Singaporeans, has this name from the Tan
state of the Zhou dynasty."

Yeah, this is complete nonsense. The "Tan" surname is basically the
hokkien/min-nan pronunciation of the chinese character 陈, which is basically
pronounced Chen in mandarin and Chan in cantonese.

It has nothing to do with the surname 譚 which is pronounced Tan in mandarin.

Due to the presence of many chinese language groups in singapore (unlike hk
which is predominantly cantonese or mainland china and taiwan which uses
mandarin), transliterations of surnames can be tricky. The same surname 王 can
be written in many ways in singapore (Ong, Heng, Wang, Wong, etc.)

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probably_wrong
If the author is here, they might want to do a small polishing in their
Spanish section.

For Argentina, it says

> This literally means “son of Gonzalo,” and though you don’t meet a lot of
> Gonzalos walking around these days, back in medieval times you did meet a
> good number of Gundisalvus’.*

First, you absolutely meet a lot of Gonzalos - it's a _very_ popular name in
South America.

Second, and nitpicking: we can make an educated guess that the ~ez suffix
means "son of". This is also seen in "Fernandez", which is "son of Fernando".

But then, why does Lopez mean "wolf" and not "son of the wolf"? And shouldn't
"Martinez" be "Son of Martin"?

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zamadatix
"But then, why does Lopez mean "wolf" and not "son of the wolf"? And shouldn't
"Martinez" be "Son of Martin"? "

According to Wikipedia:

"López is a surname of Spanish origin. It was originally a patronymic, meaning
'Son of Lope', Lope itself being a Spanish given name deriving from Latin
lupus, meaning 'wolf'."

"It originated as a patronymic surname, meaning 'son of Martín'... itself
derived from the Latin Martinus, whose root is Mars, the name of the Roman god
of fertility and war."

.

So it seems the article left out some detail from each.

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nealabq
Either there used to be a lot of iron-workers (smiths) around in English-
speaking areas back then, or iron-workers were especially good at making
babies (and not just horseshoes).

If we were adopting surnames today, I'd pick Hacker over Engineerer or
Softwarer or Programmer. Or maybe Forger, since it is someone who builds
things. Smiths also forge.

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perl4ever
Well, not just English speaking areas, what about the Schmidts? And the
Fabers? And the Kovács? And the Herreras? And the Haddads? And the
Ferraros/Ferraris? And the Kowalskis? And the Kuznets(ovs)? And the McGowans?
And the Lefebvres? And the Smits? And the Favres? And the Martels?

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nmstoker
Interesting but they are slightly off with Carl: they say it means man,
whereas it's really "free man" an important distinction! Looks like they've
dumbed things down a bit (as there's a similar discussion on Lopez below)

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Ghjklov
A lute? My sources tell me that "Nguyen" means "origin". Who to believe?

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yyhhsj0521
"王 means prince, king, or vast" is probably an error caused by confusing 王
with 汪.

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elkos
Yeap king the translation I was familiar with when I was living with a Chinese
person.

