Family Name Generator

Almost every family name in the world was built one of four ways. Patronymics name the father (Johnson, Fitzgerald, MacLeod, Petrov, Ibn-style Arabic names, Andersen); occupational names record a trade (Schneider the tailor, Kowalczyk the smith's son, Fletcher the arrow-maker, Bakker the baker); place names say where the family came from (Lancaster, Van Dijk, Tehrani, Nakamura); and descriptive names started as nicknames (Rossi for red hair, Moreau for dark, Armstrong, Bruno). Knowing which kind you are looking at tells you how a name will read: occupational names feel grounded, place names hint at an older landed family, patronymics feel ordinary and everywhere.

This list groups real surnames by origin so you can keep a family consistent. It runs through English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish names, then German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Finnish, French and Québécois, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Russian and Ukrainian, Balkan, Greek and Turkish, Jewish and Arabic, Persian, Indian and Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino and Indonesian, West, East and Southern African, Navajo, and finally American regional families: Cajun, Amish, Appalachian and old Dutch New York.

Nothing here is invented. Use the list for fiction, screenwriting, real-world tabletop campaigns, family trees in The Sims or Crusader Kings, or test data that should look like a real customer database.