News APP

NewsApp (Free)

Read news as it happens
Download NewsApp

Available on  gplay

Rediff.com  » News » Singh, Patel among most common surnames in UK

Singh, Patel among most common surnames in UK

Source: PTI
March 24, 2009 13:55 IST
Get Rediff News in your Inbox:

Decades of immigration from India has led to a situation in which Singh and Patel are among the most popular surnames in Britain, a new study has discovered. In the last 100 years, the number of people named Ahmed, Singh and Ali, has increased by more than 1,000 percent each.

People named Singh and Patel were also found to be at a record high, with 95,203 and 53,295 of them respectivelycurrently living in Britain.

The study was carried out partly by Experian, the credit agency, which used its database to find out which names were found most frequently in different parts of the country. "Surnames are useful indicators of people's origins. It's not just for people of Indian, Nigerian or Armenian origins, but also for more distant ancestry, including Celtic, Norse and Anglo-Saxon," Professor Richard Webber from King's College London, who led the research, told the Daily Telegraph.

The results of the research can be found at a website which lets people trace where their surnames originate from.To create the site, researchers examined the names of 360,000,000 people currently alive in the United States, Australia and most of Western Europe.

Get Rediff News in your Inbox:
Source: PTI© Copyright 2024 PTI. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of PTI content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent.