MeridianMERIDIAN

Last Name

identity.person.last_name

Family name (surname). Locale-specific due to surname conventions which vary by culture (e.g., patronymic names in Scandinavian and Russian cultures).

Casts to
VARCHAR
Scope
Locale-specific
Personal data
Yes — treat as PII
Locales
EN, EN_AU, EN_GB, EN_CA, EN_US, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, PL, RU, JA, ZH, KO, AR

Shape

Length 1 to 100 characters.

Pattern
^[\p{L}\s'\-]+$
ValueLengthShape
Smith5not checked
García6not checked
Dubois6not checked
田中2not checked
علي3not checked

pattern uses syntax this checker does not support

Background

Origin

In many societies, a surname or family name is the mostly hereditary portion of a personal name that indicates one's family.[1] A surname may also be called a last name, particularly in American English.[1] Not all societies place the surname last; some cultures place it at the start of a person's name.[1] Japanese, Korean and Hungarian names are ordered as family name followed by given name(s).[2]

In England, the introduction of family names is generally attributed to the preparation of the Domesday Book in 1086.[1] Japan's government formalised the structure of the Japanese name as family name plus given name in 1868.[1] Turkey's Surname Law was adopted on 21 June 1934, requiring all citizens to adopt fixed, hereditary surnames.[3]

Use

The vCard format defined in RFC 6350 structures its N property so that the first component is the family names, also known as surnames.[4] Spanish-speaking people commonly have two family names.[2] In Iceland, the second part of a name is a patronymic ending in -son or -dóttir, depending on whether the child is male or female.[2] In Russian names, the endings of the patronymic and family names indicate whether the person is male or female.[2] It would be wrong to assume that members of the same family share the same family name.[2]

The W3C advises against requiring people to supply a family name, because in parts of Southern India, Malaysia and Indonesia many people have a given name only.[2] The W3C notes that a required family name field can fill up with garbage data such as a full stop or Mr. entered just to escape the form.[2] The W3C advises allowing punctuation such as hyphens and apostrophes in names.[2] The W3C advises allowing spaces in names, for example to support prefixes such as de in French and von in German.[2] The W3C advises that forms preserve the case the user enters rather than forcing a capital at the start of each word, since some names such as van der Waals include uncapitalised words.[2]

Where you'll meet it

The US Census Bureau publishes tabulations of all surnames occurring 100 or more times in the 2010 Census returns.[5] The complete list of 162,253 names is published as zipped Excel and CSV files.[5] Smith tops the Census Bureau's list of the most common surnames, with 2,442,977 occurrences.[5]

Sources

  1. [1]Surname - Wikipediasecondary source
  2. [2]Personal names around the worldsecondary source
  3. [3]Surname Law - Wikipediasecondary source
  4. [4]RFC 6350: vCard Format Specificationstandard
  5. [5]Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Censusdataset

Detection notes

v1 migration: Was person.last_name (and person.surname). Locale-specific. Supports Unicode letters and common separators.

Use it

CLI · DuckDB
$ finetype infer -i "Smith" --mode column
→ identity.person.last_name

SELECT ft_infer('Smith');
-- → 'identity.person.last_name'
Cast expression
CAST({col} AS VARCHAR)

Schema

https://meridian.online/schemas/identity.person.last_name · Frictionless type string

finetype taxonomy identity.person.last_name -o json-schema

Aliases

surnamefamily_name

Type Registry