|
A Yahoo! Search on "most common last name" resulted in this pithy article from the good folks who bring us Meriam-Webster's Word for the Wise column. The world's most common surname (not surprisingly, considering the numbers) is Chang or Zhang. There are approximately 100 million Zhangs. The name is roughly 4,700 years old. In all of Mainland China, there are only 438 last names. Chinese surnames were originally based on geography. Here are the top five last names in the
United States, according to the 1990 data from the U.S. Census Bureau: Smith, Johnson, Williams, Jones, and Brown. There are around 3 million Smiths in the U.S., and they've held the top spot for the last 13 years. Zhang ranks pretty low on the list of American surnames -- 2292nd. Perhaps more tellingly, Garcia and Martinez rank 18th and 19th, respectively.
|
