A surname—or last name—is generally an indication of a person’s familial associations or hereditary derivation.
While our “given” or first name is an individual identifier, then, our surname is usually an indication of lineage.
How these names are used and in what order they’re presented varies from culture to culture and language to language. The given name is generally presented first in Anglophone cultures, for instance, with the surname coming after (these names sometimes separated by a middle name that’s often, but not always, based on the name of a familial precursor, like one’s grandmother or great-great-grandfather), while in some East Asian linguistic traditions (like Chinese), the (single-character) surname is generally presented first, followed by a (two-character) given name.
Surnames are thought to be a fair bit more modern than given names, as while individual names have been around since at least the beginning of writing, surnames seem to have been intentionally innovated for different purposes in different areas.
They seem to have arrived alongside centralized record-keeping in China (possibly around 2000 BC), for example, as part of an effort by the Emperor to take a useful census of his kingdom.
Around 800 BC, there’s evidence of what are called patronymic surnames in the Arab world—which basically means using the regional linguistic equivalent of “son of” as a differentiator.
So my full name would be “Colin, Son of Paul” under such a system, and this is where many surnames like “Paulson” and “Robertson” and “Stevenson,” come from.
Many cultures (including but not limited to Iceland, Poland, Georgia, and Mongolia) still use patronymic naming conventions, at times, and some use it alongside other systems, like matronymics (using the mother’s name) or toponymics (using a person’s birthplace or their family’s geographic origin, a la “Bob of Bulgaria”).
Other surnames were derived from what a forebear did for a living (my last name, “Wright,” suggests that one of my ancestors was probably a builder in England, for instance).
Notably, many modern governments allow people to change their surname (alongside their given and middle names), which can be a complex logistical undertaking, but can apparently also skew one’s fortunes, depending on what name is adopted and left behind.
A 2024 study found that folks with surnames beginning with “A” tend to receive better grades than those with surnames that start with “Z.”
The theory as to why this seems to be the case is that many professors grade papers in alphabetical order because of how their course-related software (or Learning Management System, LMS) works.
So when they’re tackling the Z-surnamed papers and exams, they’re more likely to give lower grades; possibly to due exhaustion, possibly because they have more basis for comparison for the work that arrives later.
They’ve already given high and low marks by the time they reach the end of the pile, in other words, and they’re thus more likely to be critical of papers that are further down the stack. Those that that are graded early, in contrast, aren’t being compared to much of anything (the instructors may be grading more “accurately” and on a curve by the time they reach the end of the pile).
This study resulted in what’s still a draft paper, so there’ll likely be revisions before it’s finalized. But the researchers behind it analyzed more than 30 million grades at a large university that uses the most common LMS software, and they found that students with surnames starting with the lattermost letters of the alphabet (U-Z) were docked an average of 0.6 points compared to those at the beginning (A-E).
These end-of-alphabet students also received more negative feedback from their instructors, while those at the beginning received more positive feedback.
This difference was most pronounced in social science and humanities classes, and it disappeared when the alphabetized default in the software was tweaked; when some professors flipped it so that the Z-named students came before the A-named students, in fact, the opposite happened: U-Z students attained higher average grades than the A-E students.
All of which is interesting because it gestures at an ultra-specific bias that might be associated with our names: a bias not related to prejudice against people from a surname-referenced background or hometown, but one related to defaults in commonly used software, and how those defaults seem to set some people up for unearned success, while others are hobbled in meaningful ways because of an inherited trait.