What is SurnameGuessr?
SurnameGuessris a free daily geography game about the origins of family names. Every day at midnight on your local clock, a new set of ten surnames is published. For each one, your job is to work out which country it comes from and click that country on an interactive world map. No multiple choice, no hints — just the name, the map, and whatever you know about how the world’s languages and cultures fit together.
The surnames are drawn from every region of the world — West Africa, the Caucasus, Southeast Asia, the Andes, Scandinavia, the Pacific islands — not just the European names that dominate most datasets. Each one has a verified, documented country of origin, so every round teaches you something real about geography, language, and migration.
How scoring works
A perfect guess — the exact country of origin — is worth 1,000 points, for a maximum daily score of 10,000. But surnames rarely respect borders, so the game rewards near misses too. Many names have a ranked list of secondary origin countries: guessing one of those earns between 500 and 944 pointsdepending on how strongly the name is associated with it. And if your guess isn’t on the list at all but shares its main language with the correct country — Austria for a German name, Colombia for a Spanish one — you still collect a 400-point language bonus. Good geographic reasoning is never wasted.
After every guess, the map lights up with the answer and the game shows you the name’s etymology and notable people who carry it, so even a miss leaves you knowing more than you did before.
What a surname can tell you
Family names are compressed history. Their endings, prefixes, and sound patterns encode the language they were born in: a name ending in -escu almost certainly points to Romania, -oğlu is a Turkish patronymic, -yan is Armenian, -ić marks the South Slavic countries, and -ez is the Spanish patronymic that fills the phone books of Latin America. Prefixes work the same way — O’ and Mc for Ireland and Scotland, van for the Netherlands, Abu across the Arabic-speaking world.
Playing daily builds that pattern recognition faster than any textbook. If you want a head start, our guide to recognizing surname origins walks through the most useful suffixes, prefixes, and spelling cues region by region.
More ways to play
Beyond the daily challenge there is an endless practice mode with random surnames, a full name mode where you guess the nationality of a real, notable person, and region-focused modes for Europe, Asia & the Pacific, and Africa. Signed-in players keep a daily streak, and the archive lets you go back and play every past daily game. Curious how it all started? Read the story on the about page or check the FAQ.