American Last Name Generator

There is no single kind of American last name, and that is exactly what makes one sound American. The census top ten is already a mix: Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown and Jones from England and Wales; Garcia, Rodriguez, Martinez and Hernandez from the Spanish-speaking world; Miller and Davis sitting in between. Go a little further down and you hit Nguyen, Patel, Kim, Murphy, Schmidt and Nakamura. A cast of characters whose surnames all came from one country will read as British or Irish, not American.

The list opens with the hundred most common surnames in the United States, then moves through names that signal a place or a community: Cajun French (Boudreaux, Thibodeaux, Fontenot), Pennsylvania Dutch (Stoltzfus, Yoder, Zook), old Dutch New York (Van Buren, Schuyler, Stuyvesant), Scandinavian Upper Midwest (Lindstrom, Gustafson, Halvorsen), Polish and Italian industrial cities (Kowalski, Esposito, DeLuca), Jewish (Goldberg, Shapiro), Irish (O'Connor, Gallagher), Appalachian (Hatfield, Sizemore, Caudill), surnames long carried by Black American families (Booker, Hairston, Pinckney), New Mexican Spanish (Archuleta, Trujillo, Baca), Navajo (Begay, Yazzie) and Asian-American (Tanaka, Choi, Shah, Huynh).

Every entry is a real surname in use today. For a small-town sheriff, reach for something regional; for a 1920s New York detective, an Irish or Jewish name fits the period; for a modern city, pull from anywhere on the list.