surnames

So the plaque is full of a wild mix of actual surnames and given names and of course nicknames but also the junior of the nicknamed people.

We quite often use surnames (that practice certainly comes from the military) - could this be because we might have more unique surnames than first names?

Same for Kagawa -- the Japanese use surnames in a different way, might be simpler to replace him.

- A study of rare British surnames since 1800s finds a similar rate of regression to the mean.

Wozniak is a very common Polish surname and is in the top 10 of most popular surnames there.

It happens to be one of the oldest English surnames from when people were given names after animal attributes.

Also, curiously, many Africans with their ancestral surnames will have a European forename along with an African middle name.

Make a dictionary of a few common surnames and it's pretty easy to brute force combinations.

There were Americans of German ancestry who changed their surnames to avoid discrimination and unpleasantness from other non German whites.

Maintaining a diversity across the country (unusual family surnames are often ethnically linked, and China has long promoted domestic ethnic diversity).

There are times when the plot changes and for example, in a romance, characters may switch from using surnames to first names.

I thought it was -stein too, but I posit that we all think this way because surnames ending in -stein are very common, while surnames ending in -stain are rare.

I also noticed that in my country (Poland) there's quite more people working in IT with names or surnames which begins on K (Polish word for computer is "komputer"), I'm the case.

> I also noticed that in my country (Poland) there's quite more people working in IT with names or surnames which begins on K (Polish word for computer is "komputer") You don't say...

Surnames developed around the 13th century in Britain, before that it was patronyms meaning we could recognise people via association.