About First or Last Name
A quick answer to a small, awkward question: which part of this name is the family name, and how do I address this person?
Why this exists
You write to a recruiter in Singapore, a supplier in India or a colleague in Germany. The name in their signature is Tan Wei Ming, R. Karthik or Nguyen Van Minh, and you are not sure whether to write Mr. Tan, Mr. Ming or something else. Getting it wrong is a small thing, but it is the first thing they read. This site answers that question in two fields: the name as written, and where the person is based.
How the answer is made
Every word in the name is compared with statistics about how that word is used around the world: how often it appears as a given name or as a family name, and in which countries. The check then weighs the possible readings of the whole name (family name first or last, two family names, a father's name in the middle) using the naming conventions of the country you chose, and it reads clues such as a family name written in capitals, initials, a comma, an added English name, or the particles in names like bin, van der or de la.
The result is a probability, not a fact about the person. When the name could be read in more than one way, the confidence shown is lower and the neutral greeting is the safe choice.
How accurate it is
We test on several thousand public people from 29 countries whose given and family names are recorded separately, written the ways names really appear (usual order, flipped, family name in capitals, initials, an added English name), and we remove those people from the statistics before testing. The check picks the right name to call them by in about 99% of cases written in the usual order, and about 96% when an East Asian or Hungarian name has been flipped into Western order. Real email signatures are messier than public records, so treat the answer as a well-informed guess.
Our rules
- Statistics about names, not about people. We never guess anyone's ethnicity or origin.
- Gender only as a name statistic. We suggest Mr. or Ms. only when at least 95% of people with that name in our data are men or women, and a neutral greeting is always offered.
- Your input stays with you. The check runs in your browser. See Privacy.
Data sources
- Wikidata, given and family names of several million people by country of citizenship (CC0).
- US Social Security Administration, given names of babies born 1950 to 2017 (public domain).
- US Census Bureau, family names from the 2010 census (public domain; race and ethnicity columns not used).
Contact
Found a name we get wrong? Write to [email protected]. Please describe the name pattern rather than sending a real person's full name.