# Last Name

Key: `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).

Page: <https://meridian.online/docs/projects/finetype/types/identity/person/last_name>

Samples: `Smith`, `García`, `Dubois`, `田中`, `علي`

## 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]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname) A surname may also be called a last name, particularly in American English.[[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname) Not all societies place the surname last; some cultures place it at the start of a person's name.[[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname) Japanese, Korean and Hungarian names are ordered as family name followed by given name(s).[[2]](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names)

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

### 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]](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6350) Spanish-speaking people commonly have two family names.[[2]](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names) 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]](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names) In Russian names, the endings of the patronymic and family names indicate whether the person is male or female.[[2]](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names) It would be wrong to assume that members of the same family share the same family name.[[2]](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names)

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]](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names) 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]](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names) The W3C advises allowing punctuation such as hyphens and apostrophes in names.[[2]](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names) The W3C advises allowing spaces in names, for example to support prefixes such as de in French and von in German.[[2]](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names) 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]](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names)

### 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]](https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/2010_surnames.html) The complete list of 162,253 names is published as zipped Excel and CSV files.[[5]](https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/2010_surnames.html) Smith tops the Census Bureau's list of the most common surnames, with 2,442,977 occurrences.[[5]](https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/2010_surnames.html)

## Sources

1. [Surname - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname) — secondary source
2. [Personal names around the world](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names) — secondary source
3. [Surname Law - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname_Law) — secondary source
4. [RFC 6350: vCard Format Specification](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6350) — standard
5. [Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census](https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/2010_surnames.html) — dataset