No prizes for guessing the most popular surname in Ireland.
As you’ve probably guessed and as you may have read on a list of the most common surnames in Ireland and the most common Irish surnames around the world, it’s Murphy.
Frankly, if you don’t know anyone with that surname, well, you must not know a lot of Irish people.
The Murphy name has pride of place on a map of the most common surname in every European country drawn up a linguist known as Jakub Marian, who posted it on his blog in recent days.
Another map, meanwhile, features the English explanation for all the most common surnames in every country, which is particularly interesting in Hungary, where the most popular surname is ‘Nagy’ or, simply, ‘Big’.
While ‘Sea Warrior’ for Murphy is impressive, if we had to swap our most common surname with any other country it would surely be Turkey, where the most common surname, Yilmaz, is translated into English as ‘Dauntless’.
“Hi, I’m Tom Dauntless,” sure has nice ring to it.
We’d definitely keep it ahead of the Finnish alternative, Korhonen (see map above for explanation) that’s for sure.
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