What is the longest surname that you have had to deal with ?

Question

Hi Folks,

Mine is a measly 6 characters, but as secretary of a local club, my members spreadsheet is a problem, as I have to fit in a gent of Greek extraction with 17 characters to his surname

Have you come across any longer ones, without hyphenation, or "double-barreled" ?

The shortest one I have dealt with was a Chinese air-conditioning engineer called "Cho". his passport proved it !

Bob

Answer 1

My own surname is the longest I have personally encountered with 12 letters... until today at work I saw someone with 13 letters in their surname.

The shortest surname I've ever seen belonged to a friend of mine in high school.  She was Cambodian and her last name was the single letter E.  That's right, one letter, that was her official surname.

Answer 2

Mine is pretty long! It has 10 letters plus a space in between the two parts. It's a French surname similar to Simon Le Bon's (Duran Duran singer). And my first name has 8 letters so it can be a bit tricky sometimes to fit everything on the small spaces provided on paper forms!

Answer 3

I think the longest I've had so far are *******-******(13 total) and ******-*******(13 total), who both work in my office, but they're obviously hyphenated. The shortest surname was 2 letters; Li. The longest non-hypenated name I've dealt with (that I can remember right now) is probably Lawrenceson, but that's only 11 letters.

I think the hardest one I've had to write is Kamakawiwo'ole (Hawai'ian), but I've also had Russian names that are really hard to spell.

Answer 4

The longest place names in the world are typically Welsh.

Longest people names, typically Thai.

Answer 5

I think the longest surname on my main working tree is that of Therfila Dannilloweczowac, b. 1602, in what is now Poland.

(Ask this again in the tongue-twister section, and I'll be glad to give you the same answer!)

Answer 6

There was a guy on University Challenge whose surname was Balasubramanyan.

Answer 7

god. i work in market research and telephone businesses. our biggest client is the government but we also have vodafone, the post office and hp.

we once did one for amex so obviosly we were ringing up loads of restaurants and the names we were getting were unbelievable. we just had to ask for 'the manager' cos we couldnt pronounce them lol

cant think of any off hand but i swear its true

Tracey x*x

ps. up til then i didnt realise amex was american express !!! how dumb am i ??? lol

Answer 8

Haha, yeh the shortest ones are from Chinese; my friend's has Lee as his surname.

The longest one... do you remember Arnorld Schwarzeneger?  I don't even know if I spelt it right.

Answer 9

Longest I have ever saw: It was about 11 characters, I don't remember the name.

Longest in my Genealogy: de Kygnesburie

Shortest: Shore

Answer 10

My surname is 10 letters, which some people think is long, but I don't think so.  The longest surname I've come across is Westerrellermann (16 letters), from Germany.  One person with several first names actually didn't fit into the space on my genealogy program!  Cool question!

Answer 11

I went to college with a fellow who was the grandson of people from Norway (I can't spell Norweigian, I don't think), named 'Harju'.  When I asked him what heritage that was, he told me Norway, but that the complete name was over 100 characters long, describing in detail where the family lived in Norway several centuries ago.