About SurnameGuessr

The idea

I have always been fascinated by world geography, different cultures, and the way language shapes identity. One of the habits I picked up over the years was hearing a surname - in a film, on a news broadcast, on a name badge - and quietly trying to place it. Is that name Eastern European? North African? South Asian? What does the ending tell you about the language family? What does the root word mean?

It turns out this is a surprisingly rich puzzle. Surnames are compressed history. They encode migration routes, colonial boundaries, religious influences, and centuries of linguistic drift into just a handful of letters. I found myself doing it automatically, almost as a reflex, whenever I came across a new name.

Why I built it

I wanted to turn that habit into a game - partly for myself, and partly because I suspected there were other people out there who do the same thing. Geography nerds, language enthusiasts, people who have lived in many countries, anyone who has ever looked at a surname and thought “I wonder where that’s from.”

SurnameGuessr is the result. Every day, ten surnames. You look at each one and click the country you think it originates from on a world map. No hints. No multiple choice. Just the name, the map, and whatever you know about how the world is put together.

How the surnames are chosen

Each surname in the game has been verified to have a clear, documented country of origin. The data is enriched using NamSor, a specialist name-analysis service that uses machine learning trained on millions of global names to determine origin by country and language. Surnames that score ambiguously - names common to many regions - are filtered out in favour of ones with a strong, identifiable origin signal.

The pool is also curated to span the full range of the world’s geography. You will encounter names from West Africa, the Caucasus, Southeast Asia, the Andes, and everywhere in between, not just the usual European surnames that dominate English-language datasets.

What you actually learn

Playing regularly builds a genuine mental map of surname patterns across the world. You start noticing that names ending in -escu point to Romania, that -oglu is a Turkish patronymic suffix, that the double-L in a Welsh name sounds nothing like the double-L in a Spanish one. You learn to distinguish Finnish from Estonian, Ghanaian Akan from Nigerian Yoruba, Filipino from Indonesian.

None of that is taught explicitly in the game. You pick it up through repetition and feedback, the same way you would absorb anything through experience. That is the part I enjoy most about it.

How scoring works

Each correct guess earns up to 1,000 points, giving a maximum daily score of 10,000. There is also a language bonus: if you correctly identify a country that shares the same language family as the surname’s true origin - even if it is not the exact country - you earn a partial bonus of 400 points. This rewards geographic and linguistic reasoning even when you are not perfectly right.

Streaks track how many consecutive days you have completed the daily game. The archive lets you play past games without affecting your streak, so you can catch up without pressure.

Premium features

The daily game is completely free and always will be. A premium subscription unlocks region-specific game modes (Europe, Asia & Pacific, Africa), unlimited full name games (one is free per day without premium), and full access to every past game in the archive. Premium exists to keep the lights on and fund ongoing surname curation.