Surnames Registered with the Guild Each of the surnames listed is the subject of a one-name study carried out by a Guild member and links to our full search results for that study.
Top 500 names Surnames 1-500 This list was supplied by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). It is taken from a survey of the National Health Service Central Register. This is a database of circa 60 million names of those who were registered with the NHS in 1991, and subsequent registrations.
The Modern British Surnames part of the Guild of One-Name Studies’ website is dedicated to the memory of the late Philip Dance who created Modern British Surnames: a resource guide and was an enthusiastic proponent of the study of the distribution, incidence and statistical analysis of the surnames of Britain. Philip’s research also includes extensive content on countries throughout the ...
See also the page on Variant and deviant surnames. There are eight main types of surname: Locative : derives from the place where someone came from or lived. This is the most common type of surname in England. Sub-categories of locative are: Topographical : derived from a distinctive geographical feature, e.g. Green, Hill, Langridge, Townsend.
The first publication to analyse the relative frequency of leading surnames was the Sixteenth Annual Report of the Registrar General of England and Wales, published in 1856.
Such surnames have been excluded from the lists here. Table 6 – Most popular second names, Victorian period ... * as a percentage of all males with second names ** see Table 2 A sub-sample of about 5000 bridegrooms (1867–1886) gave 792 (14%) with a second name. Together they shared about 115 different second names.