Irish surnames ending in 'an' or 'y'

bonzodog2 · 18-11-2007 9:04pm #1

I hope this is an appropriate forum to post this in.....

It occurred to me that a sizable proportion of Irish surnames ended
in either 'y' or 'an'. To test this conjecture, I downloaded a list
of Irish names (can't remember where from). It has 330 entries and
I don't beleive it to be exhaustively complete. For instance it
doesn't include my landlord's name, which falls into the ending
with 'an' category. However, I think its large enough to test the
theory. I wrote a very simple 'C' program to read the names and
output them backwards, then sorted them alphabetically, thus
grouping all ending in 'y' together, etc.

The results
110 end in 'y' [33.3%]
89 end in 'an' [26.9%]
124 end in 'n' including 'an' [37.5%]

so my original conjecture, 199 of 330 ended in 'y' or 'an' [60.3%]

hope somebody was interested...............!

Agent Smith · 18-11-2007 9:09pm

i was
my surname ends in a y!

SpitfireIV · 18-11-2007 9:12pm

I'm a Y'ie too

jmayo · 19-11-2007 12:19pm

bonzodog2 wrote: »

I hope this is an appropriate forum to post this in.....

It occurred to me that a sizable proportion of Irish surnames ended
in either 'y' or 'an'. To test this conjecture, I downloaded a list
of Irish names (can't remember where from). It has 330 entries and
I don't beleive it to be exhaustively complete. For instance it
doesn't include my landlord's name, which falls into the ending
with 'an' category. However, I think its large enough to test the
theory. I wrote a very simple 'C' program to read the names and
output them backwards, then sorted them alphabetically, thus
grouping all ending in 'y' together, etc.

The results
110 end in 'y' [33.3%]
89 end in 'an' [26.9%]
124 end in 'n' including 'an' [37.5%]

so my original conjecture, 199 of 330 ended in 'y' or 'an' [60.3%]

hope somebody was interested...............!