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Add missing common English surnames to the en locale - #3330

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AmritD wants to merge 1 commit into
faker-ruby:mainfrom
AmritD:en-common-last-names
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AmritD wants to merge 1 commit into
faker-ruby:mainfrom
AmritD:en-common-last-names

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@AmritD

@AmritD AmritD commented Oct 5, 2026

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Problem

name.last_name in the en locale omits 40 of England's 60 most common surnames, among them Taylor (rank 3), Williams (5), Wilson (6) and Davies (8). It does carry a tail of rare legacy entries: Altenwerth, for example, has roughly 66 bearers worldwide, all of them in Germany.

Since en is the fallback for en-GB and every other English locale except en-US, Faker::Name.last_name seldom returns a surname that reads as ordinary.

Changes

62 surnames added to lib/locales/en/name.yml, 472 to 534 entries. Nothing removed or renamed. This closes the England top-60 gap and fills in common surnames that were missing on the US side too, such as Nelson, Stewart, Peterson, Reed and Brooks.

Entries follow the file's existing order, which is case insensitive and ignores apostrophes, and rake reformat_yaml leaves the result unchanged.

Sourcing

No list was copied from a single source. Candidates were drawn from general knowledge of English surnames and checked individually against published surname frequency data, with the ranking cross-checked against England's surname frequency table.

Console output

Faker::Base.fetch_all('name.last_name').size
534
%w[Taylor Williams Wilson Davies Patel Khan Singh].all? { |n| Faker::Base.fetch_all('name.last_name').include?(n) }
true
Faker::Config.random = Random.new(42); Array.new(8) { Faker::Name.last_name }

["Denesik",
 "Schuster",
 "Langosh",
 "Dickinson",
 "Clarke",
 "Batz",
 "Evans",
 "Taylor"]
exit

Notes

Seeded output changes, since the length of the list changes.

The en last_name list omits 40 of England's 60 most common surnames,
among them Taylor, Williams, Wilson and Davies, while retaining rare
legacy entries such as Altenwerth. This adds 62 surnames that are
common across English speaking countries.
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