British Surnames and Surname Profiles

About the British Surname Website

This site was initially started as a caching copy of the Surname Profiler website created by University College London (UCL), available at http://cetl2.geog.ucl.ac.uk/UCLnames/default.aspx.

While a useful source of information, the main problem with the UCL site is that it gets overloaded too easily at peak times, making it unusable. This site exists to present the same data, but without placing additional load on the UCL servers. Once searched here, the data is cached and subsequent searches will use the local copy.

(Update: the local database now has a full copy of the UCL data, mostly as a result of additional lookups being triggered by Google's spider. So if the name isn't here now, it never will be.)

Another issue with the UCL site is that it requires Javascript and cookies to be enabled on the user's browser, which makes it less than fully accessible. This site requires neither, and should work equally well in all browsers (even if it doesn't always look exactly the same!).

As well as the surname profiler, we're now adding other content such as surname etymology and links to help you explore the origins of your surname.

This site is still a work in progress, so please don't be surprised if something fails to work correctly straight away!

Comments, suggestions and even moans and gripes are welcome. You can contact us by email 'info {at} britishsurnames.co.uk', making the obvious replacement in the address.