Last Name Generator

How the last name generator picks surnames

The page holds 15 surname lists. English is the longest with 69 entries, Chinese and Korean have 45 each, and the other twelve origins 46 each, for 710 entries in all. On “All origins” the lists are pooled, so every entry has the same 1 in 710 chance and an English surname turns up about one time in ten.

A batch never uses the same list entry twice. The generator keeps drawing until it has as many different entries as you asked for, and 20, the maximum, is well under the size of every list. Each draw comes from the browser's cryptographic random generator, as described in how our randomness works.

How to generate a list of last names

1. Choose an origin: English/British, Spanish/Hispanic, Italian, German, French, Irish, Scottish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Arabic, Russian, Polish or Greek. Or leave it on All Origins.
2. Set how many names you want, from 1 to 20.
3. Press “Generate Last Names”. Press it again for a fresh batch.

Where the surname lists come from

These are lists of common surnames, not a genealogical database. They group surnames by broad cultural or language origin, not by country of citizenship. Treat results as plausible names, not as a sample of any real population.

Some lists overlap. Campbell is on the English, Irish and Scottish lists, Murray and Johnston on both the Irish and Scottish ones, and Garcia and Martinez on the Spanish and French ones. In all, 26 surnames appear on two or more lists, which leaves 682 different surnames.

The English list starts with Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown and Jones, the five most common surnames in the 2010 US census. That census counted 162,253 surnames carried by 100 or more people, so any short list is a small selection.

Example: a ship's crew for a tabletop game

A game master needs surnames for eight sailors on a Baltic trading ship. Set the origin to Polish and the count to 8 for half the crew, then switch to Russian for the other half. Each batch has eight different names, and the origin is easy to change between batches.

For first names to go with them, use the first name generator. The fake name generator gives first and last name together from ten origins, and the name generator gives full names, first names or surnames in batches of up to 50.

For test data, the lists are a quick way to check how a form handles apostrophes (O'Brien on the Irish list), hyphens (Al-Rashid on the Arabic list) and long names (Panagiotopoulos on the Greek list). The test data generator adds emails and phone numbers that cannot reach a real person.