The U.S. Census Bureau has just released some data from the 2000 Census: Most frequently occurring surnames.
‘Midgley’ is ranked at 18,854, somewhere between ‘Commander’ and ‘Dummer’. That’s down from 17,653 ten years ago — falling more than a thousand points! So there aren’t a lot of us. But at least when I google my name, almost all the hits are me.
A related article from the New York Times observes that Vargas is the new Thompson.
Census data isn’t just interesting; it’s useful for language researchers. For example, I use it to plow through dialogue corpora to find first and last names, and change them all into ‘#firstname’ and ‘#lastname’. That way, my classifier can find (for example) introduction sequences more easily because it’s not trying to look for a hundred different names.
21 November 2007 at 3:21 am
Haha, that’s funny I was going to ask you if you’d ever googled your own name.
21 November 2007 at 3:23 am
Constantly!
21 November 2007 at 9:30 am
So, one Thomas Midgley Jr., according to one historian: “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth history.”
Google his name and find out.
I’m sure he’s not related. But it’s interesting how one guy could cause so much uproar.
21 November 2007 at 10:57 pm
lol Daniel – I don’t know if your children do this but mine google my name to impress their friends! Sign of the times. Of course as I’m the only person on the planet with my firstname surname combo … There’s a rather flattering photo of me on ‘images’ too actually.