What does your name mean? Forebears website reveals surname origin

Smith is most common family name in Australia, US and England, website claims

A baby with blue eyes (WestEnd61/REX Shutterstock)

A new website claims to be able tell you how common your surname is, how many people bear the same title as you, and where that name originated from.

Forebears collects genealogical data from multiple sources and displays the distribution of those names around the world.

The most common family name in Australia, the US and England is Smith, it claims, with 4,299,406 Smiths worldwide, while 76,545,675 reportedly bear the “most common” surname in the world: Wang.

Forebears website claims to reveal the origins of your surname (Screenshot)

These are the world’s 10 most common surnames according to Forebears:

1) Wang

2) Devi

3) Zhang

4) Li

5) Liu

6) Singh

7) Yang

8) Kumar

9) Wu

10) Xu

Site administrators say the statistics are not intended as definitive figures but rather as “best approximations".

Its popularity follows that of a website created by geographers at University College London called “Named”, which crashed in February after making headlines around the world.

The UCL team used data from telephone directories and electoral rolls in 26 countries, as part of their research into links between names and locations.