I found myself thinking recently, “Self, what do you think is the most common final letter of last names in the United States?” (No, really. I did.)
A quick search found that one person had figured out the most common first letters for last names, but I could find nothing about the final letter of the last name.
My gut instinct says “n” is the letter. So, I a ran test using the same data as that guy did. I was close.
- s – 13,494,200
- n – 12,698,100
- r – 5,414,900
- z – 4,083,700
- h – 2,772,200
- l – 2,730,800
- e – 2,507,600
- t – 1,909,600
- g – 1,308,900
- y – 1,471,500
- d – 1,207,000
- a – 1,011,300
- k – 967,200
- x – 303,100
Now, to tell the truth, this doesn’t really answer my question because it’s taking into account the number of people with a certain last name and not just the individual names themselves. Counting it that way, we get these results:
- s – 26
- n – 20
- r – 11
- z – 9
- l – 7
- t – 5
- y – 5
- d – 4
- e – 4
- g – 3
- a – 2
- k – 2
- h – 1
- x – 1
Pretty darn similar results, interestingly. And a surprisingly strong showing for “z” in both cases.
I’d be curious to see how these numbers work out for a larger data pool (over, say, 5000 names). But, for now, using the top 100 names is sufficient.
Posted in Just Plain Odd