Tuesday, September 02, 2003

3,176
That's the ranking in popularity (or at least commonality) of my surname in the United States, according to this web site. Just for fun, I ran the surnames of a few friends to determine who's the most... common. The results:

Allen: 28
Kelly: 67
Siemens: 23,707
Valenta: 18,029
Scribner: 5,273
Shoolis: Shoolis, as a surname, does not exist in this database, because it is not among the top 55,000 most common names in the US. (Hahahaha!)
Mendini: Mendini, as a surname, does not exist in this database, because it is not among the top 55,000 most common names in the US. (Hahahaha)
Rao: 6,020
Kaplan: 1,015
McGraw: 1,487
Donelan: 26,683
Crawford: 136
Vernon: 1,756

Interesting. Well, to me, at least.

Next I decided to check out the names of some of my fictional characters from The Night We Met and my upcoming novel Trust Fund Boys:

From The Night We Met:
Westlake: 11,531
DiBenedetto: DiBenedetto, as a surname, does not exist in this database, because it is not among the top 55,000 most common names in the US.
Hanrahan: 6,184
Carlyle: 9,461
Waverly: Waverly, as a surname, does not exist in this database, because it is not among the top 55,000 most common names in the US.
Campbell: 42
Macarini: Macarini, as a surname, does not exist in this database, because it is not among the top 55,000 most common names in the US.

From Trust Fund Boys:
Revere: 23,634
Brock: 479
Maldonado: 321
Donovan: 702
DeVries: 3,051
Venezuela: Venezuela, as a surname, does not exist in this database, because it is not among the top 55,000 most common names in the US. (I could have told them that...)
Whitehead: 634
Ryan: 183
King: 32
Golodnya: Golodnya, as a surname, does not exist in this database, because it is not among the top 55,000 most common names in the US. (That, too...)

I probably shouldn't find this quite as interesting as I do.