Always wondered about Icelandic phone books (back when such things existed.) All the Sigriddson’s and Sigridsdatter’s must have been maddening!
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Alphabetical by first name. Where there is more than one person with the same patronymic, their occupation is listed. And yes the President is in the phone book - or at least it was, the last one to be printed was in 2016.
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Eh, plenty of Beckers in Germany as well. Orthography wasn’t standardised after all.
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For someone who cites a lot of Icelandic academics this is a pain in the ass, btw. They are supposed to appear in the bibliography by first name, but good luck convincing a bibliography program to do that.
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Heheheh! Yes, I had that problem with my masters dissertation - for some inexplicable reason there are lots of Icelanders who know a lot about Icelandic volcanoes, but did Zotero care?
And that was on top of the pain of writing Icelandic (place)names without an Icelandic keyboard.
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Well I have an Icelandic keyboard installed, mostly for writing Old Norse, so that’s not a problem at least
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You prompted me to search for “bibtex icelandic surname”, and it seems that it should be doable in BibTeX.
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My real surname is a relatively boring occupation-based one, though not one of the most common trades.
My fake surname is based on a village-level official of old, nominally a tax collector but in practice more of a general-purpose of the local lord. The exactly terminology varied from region to region, but one of those per village resulted in a name that was like “Smith”: locally distinctive but common as dirt overall. Also basically ungoogleable, which is why I chose it.
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Seen in the cemetery near us (the other side was exactly the same).
The strangest part was, when we brought some friends to show them the next day, we couldn’t find it anywhere.
Just kidding. There apparently is a family of that surname, with some other members buried nearby. I wonder about the origin of the name. Gravedigger? Serial killer? Incompetent doctor/chef?
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My surname is still very geographically linked to Cumberland, to the extent that if someone has it there is a good chance that they have lived close to or in Carlisle at some point in their life.
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It’s usually spelled “De’Ath”, and there are two etymologies. First is a locative in origin: “From Ath”, first recorded Gerardus de Athia in 1208.
The other is thought to be a Passion Play origin, as mentioned for Satan, mentioned by @Shuck above. That is, whenever the Passion Play came around, it was always someone from the same family who performed Death, and that’s how people distinguished them.
If you’re interested in English surnames, then the standard reference is Reaney and Wilson’s A Dictionary of English Surnames. There are other works for other languages and cultures, including Woulfe’s Irish Names and Surnames, and Dauzat’s Dictionnaire étymologique des noms de famille et prénoms de France. for French. (duh)
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Fascinating. Thanks.
My own family name is a rare one, maybe numbering in the hundreds worldwide. A search in Canada turns up our immediate family, six or so, and a couple in BC who just showed up last year. The interesting thing, to me anyway, is that if you take the last six letters of the two-syllable name and put any consonant in front of them, like [random consonant][last six letters], you have about a 50/50 chance of coming up with an actual surname. Making minor changes to the vowels in the six letters results in dozens more names of the same pattern.
I’ll have to check out Reaney and Wilson.
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My mother’s maiden name is very rare, to the point that if you are in Australia or the USA with that surname, you’re probably my cousin.
It’s from Norway: in about 1900 there was a push to move away from (old fashioned, rustic) Patronyms to the Surnames they used everywhere else in Europe. Some people took their patronym as their surname, so Gunnar Pederson would name his children Pederson as well. Others took their Gårdsnavn, the name of the farm or property where they lived, as their surname. That’s what my great-great grandfather did, before he became a sailor and ended up settling down on the other side of the world.
Gårdsnavne are a longstanding thing in Norway, so when you’re looking up Norwegian surnames, you’re just as likely to need a copy of Olaf Rygh’s Norske Gaardnavne next to you.
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Re one of my fav authors, Umberto Eco (source: Wiki); an interesting way to acquire a surname.
Towards the end of his life, Eco came to believe that his family name was an acronym of ex caelis oblatus (from Latin: a gift from the heavens). As was the custom at the time, the name had been given to his grandfather (a foundling) by an official in city hall. In a 2011 interview, Eco explained that a friend happened to come across the acronym on a list of Jesuit acronyms in the Vatican Library, informing him of the likely origin of the name.
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Apparently F*** is a name…
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Maybe they read the Bhagavad-Gita and liked it very much.
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Roger Fuck-by-the-navel, outlawed 1311.
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I get the sense that occupational surnames are more common for a skilled or specialised trade, or at least one uncommon enough that using it as a surname would be useful.
Smith is a far more common surname than Shepherd, even though England at the time when surnames were adopted had many more shepherds than smiths. This makes a lot of sense- if your village has 10 men named John, one of whom happens to be the blacksmith, then if you say John (the) Smith people will know who you are talking about. But if three of the Johns are shepherds, then if you say John (the) Shepherd people don’t know which of those three you mean- so those Johns get different surnames.
Bret Devereux also points out in his excellent blog that there are a great many surnames from trades that worked with wood- “Carpenter, Cooper, Fletcher, Bowyer, Turner, Sawyer and Wheeler”- but none referring to cutting down the trees in the first place. He suggests that this means that woodcutting was not a specialized job, but something done by peasants and small farmers who also did other work.
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I just checked out this website. https://forebears.io/surnames
A search for my surname shows there are 390 of us in the world, with the biggest concentrations in England and South Africa. There is one lonely soul in France. 
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