German Name Generator

What the German name generator does

You want a German name. For a character, a game, a story, a family tree you are trying to trace.

This hands you German names. Generate a set and read down.

Then stick around, because the most common German surnames turn out to be a photograph of a medieval town, and once you can read them you are looking at a list of everybody's ancestor's job.

How to use it

Pick how many you want, from one to a hundred, and press Generate for a fresh set. Press Copy to take them with you.

The most common German surnames are a list of medieval jobs

Here are the most common surnames in Germany, in order, with what they mean.

• Müller, miller. The most common of all, carried by close to a million people.
• Schmidt, smith.
• Schneider, tailor.
• Fischer, fisher.
• Weber, weaver.
• Meyer, originally a steward or the man who ran a manor farm.
• Wagner, wainwright, the man who built carts.
• Becker, baker.
• Schulz, the medieval village headman.
• Hoffmann, the man of the farmstead.

Look at that list again. It is not a list of families. It is a list of the jobs a town could not run without.

Every village needed someone to grind the grain, so there is a miller in every village, so Müller is everywhere. Every village needed a smith, a tailor, a baker, someone to mend the carts. Those trades existed in every settlement across the whole German-speaking world, independently, at the same time. So when people started needing surnames, the same handful of jobs got turned into the same handful of names, in thousands of places at once, with nobody coordinating.

That is why these names are so common. It is not that these families were enormous. It is that the job was in every town, and the job became the name.

The category even has a name of its own in German. A surname from a trade is a Berufsname, an occupation-name, and in the German-speaking world it is the single largest category of surname there is. The reason is written into the history of the place: medieval German society organised itself around specialised crafts, the guild and the trade, and when the time came to fix a family name, the trade was the most obvious true thing about a man.

So Schmidt is the German Smith, and Müller is the German Miller, and between them they tell you that the two most important people in any medieval town were the one who worked the metal and the one who ground the grain. The proof is that their names outlasted everyone else's.

You can read the trade off the ending

It goes deeper than the famous ten, because German is a language that builds words by gluing smaller words together, and the surnames are built the same way. Learn a few endings and you can often read a job straight off a name you have never seen.

• -er turns a thing into the person who works with it. Schaf is sheep, so Schäfer is a shepherd. Fisch is fish, so Fischer is a fisher.
• -mann, man, marks the man of a place or a thing. Hoffmann is the man of the farm, Hof. Baumann is the man who builds, or the man of the land.
• -macher, maker. Schumacher is a shoemaker, plain as day, Schuh plus maker. It is exactly the English shoe-maker with the parts in German.
• -hauer, cutter or hewer. Baumhauer is a tree-cutter.

This is the thing English mostly cannot do. An English speaker cannot look at Cooper and know it is a barrel-maker unless they happen to have learned it. But a German speaker can look at Schuhmacher and simply read it, because the parts are still ordinary living words. The name never became opaque. It stayed a sentence.

Which is also, incidentally, how you get the long ones. Schwarzenegger, to borrow a famous name, is not a random pile of syllables. It is buildable out of real German pieces, the way the whole language is. German surnames are long when they are long because German just keeps welding words together, and it does it to names as happily as to anything else.

Why the same name is spelled three ways, and 1876

Look at the list on this page and you will find both Schmidt and Schmitt. They are the same name. Say them out loud, they are barely different. So why two spellings?

Because for most of the history of these names, there was no correct spelling. There was no rule, no register, no official who would tell you that your family name was spelled this way and not that way. There was just the sound, and whoever was writing it down that day spelled it however seemed right to them.

So a single family name might appear a dozen different ways across the records. Schmidt, Schmitt, Schmid, Schmit, Schmied. Each priest, each clerk, each tax collector spelled it by ear, in their own local dialect, and none of them were wrong because there was nothing to be wrong against.

Then the state arrived.

Prussia introduced compulsory civil registration in 1874, and the new German Empire extended it across the whole country in 1876. For the first time there was a central office whose job was to write your name down and keep it. And the spelling your family happened to have on the day that office opened its book is, very often, the spelling your family has now. It froze.

So the different spellings of what is really one name are a fossil of the exact moment the paperwork caught up with the people. Two families who had been saying the same name for four hundred years walked into two different registry offices, a clerk in each wrote down what he heard, and their descendants have spelled it differently ever since. Schmidt and Schmitt are not two names. They are one name, photographed at the instant it was pinned down, in two towns with two clerks.

Taking a German name apart

Most of the list is trades, but not all of it, and the other kinds are just as readable once you know the four buckets German surnames fall into.

The trade, which you now know. Schmidt, Müller, Weber, Becker, Wagner, Schäfer, Koch (cook), Bauer (farmer).

The look of you. Klein means small. Braun means brown. Krause means curly-haired. These are a neighbour's description that stuck to a family, exactly like the Italian Rossi or the English Brown. Somewhere back there a genuinely short man was called Klein, and his descendants are still Klein, most of them presumably of ordinary height.

Where you lived. Berger is the man from the hill or mountain, Berg. Bach is the stream. The family lived by the feature, so the family took its name.

Your father. Names that are just an ancestor's first name, sometimes with a possessive on the end. In the north especially you get the -sen ending, son, so Petersen is the son of Peter, exactly like the Scandinavian names it sits next to geographically.

So a German name is the same four-part story every European surname tells, just told in German and, unusually, still legible. Your trade, your face, your place, or your father. Schmidt, Klein, Berger, Petersen. The smith, the small one, the man from the hill, the son of Peter.

One thing worth knowing for a story. The umlaut is not optional decoration. Müller with the two dots and Mueller without them are the same name, and the ue spelling is the correct way to write it when the dots are not available, which is why so many German-descended Americans are Mueller. If your character emigrated, the dots very often fell off at the border, and that is a real and datable thing rather than a mistake.

How this list was gathered

Nothing clever here, on purpose. The names were gathered by hand, one at a time, using given names Germans actually use and the surnames that are genuinely common across the country. Each press of Generate draws at random, and a batch never repeats an entry.

Everything happens on your side of the screen, and nothing is sent away.

Questions people ask

Why is nearly every common German surname a job?

Because every town needed the same trades, so the same trade-names were created in thousands of places at once. A miller, a smith, a tailor and a baker existed in every village, which is exactly why Müller, Schmidt, Schneider and Becker are everywhere. The job was common, so the name is common.

Are Schmidt and Schmitt different names?

No, the same name with two spellings. Before civil registration standardised things in the 1870s, there was no official spelling, so the same name appears many ways in old records. Whatever spelling a family had when the registry office opened tended to stick.

Does Müller or Mueller matter?

Same name. Mueller is the correct way to write Müller when the umlaut is not available, so the two dots become ue. A lot of German-descended families abroad are Mueller for exactly this reason, the dots having been lost in transit.

Why are some German surnames so long?

Because German builds words by joining smaller words together, and it does the same to names. A long German surname is usually readable if you break it into its pieces, since the pieces are still ordinary words. It is a sentence, not a random string.

What does von mean in a German name?

Of, or from. It often marked nobility, a family named after the estate they held, so von somewhere meant the lords of that place. It is not a guarantee of blue blood, but it is where the association comes from, and it is why it feels aristocratic.

References

1. List of the most common surnames in Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_surnames_in_Germany
2. Müller (surname). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCller_(surname)
3. Common German Last Names and Their Meanings. GenealogyBank. https://blog.genealogybank.com/common-german-last-names-their-meanings.html
4. German Surnames, based on Destatis and civil registry data. Surnam.es. https://surnam.es/germany