The Penguin Dictionary of Surnames (Penguin Reference Books) [Paperback]

Basil Cottle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 7, 1984

An analysis of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish surnames, including the 100 most common in the United Kingdom, the British Commonwealth and the United States. As well as those that are rare, meanings are given, along with the language stock from which names derive and, wherever possible, their present distribution. Entries are assigned to the four broad classes of surnames: first-names; localities, occupations, nicknames.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Puffin; 2nd edition (August 7, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014051032X
• ISBN-13: 978-0140510324
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #797,823 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Problem Solvers for Every Writer Who Needs to Name a Character, October 20, 2005

By 

Vesta Irene (the Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Penguin Dictionary of Surnames (Penguin Reference Books) (Paperback)

I write short stories and my husband is a novelist, so we are always on the lookout for good names for our characters. If we see a good name in a newspaper or meet someone who has a good name, we write it down. For example, I just met a car salesman named Donovan Smith. What a cool name, so it's in my handy, dandy, little notebook. However, we write a lot and we're not going to find all the names we need that way. Besides, we don't want to get sued, so generally we make them up and for help doing that we turn to three reference books, books that will make the life of any writer of fiction a tiny bit easier.

I suppose every writer knows about Sherrilyn Kenyon's CHARACTER NAMING SOURCEBOOK. Ms. Kenyon's book starts out with a short chapter on the craft of naming, then she goes right into the name lists, giving her readers lists of all kinds of names from Anglo-Saxon to Welsh with thirty-three others thrown in in between, like Armenian, Celtic, Danish, Dutch and plenty more. She gives us both male and female names and their meanings and that's handy for giving good guys and bad guys names, because you can give your villains dark sounding mysterious names. This book is a must for writers. I really believe that.

Basil Cottle's DICTIONARY OF SURNAMES is also an excellent resource for finding names that we turn to a lot. Where else would you find surnames like Icemonger, Inger or Iorwerth. Great names here. However, I should say that there are only names here that have originated in the British Isles. There are a whole lot of them though, along with an excellent introduction of surnames and how they came to be. Mr. Cottle also gives us a brief history and meaning of every name. This book, like the one I mentioned above, is also a must for fiction writer.

And lastly there is THE VERY BEST BABY NAME BOOK, by Bruce Lansky, which we also turn to a lot. I may seem silly, at first, for a serious writer to include this book along with the first two books, but babies grow up and they keep their names. And there are 30,001 names in this book, names from everywhere in the world along with a few facts about many of the names. My husband the novelist actually uses this book more than the others. If you write a lot, then you should have this book too.

If you have all three of these books in your writer's arsenal, then you'll never need to look any further for a name, though good names often turn up in the most unlikely of places, so I'd keep that handy, dandy, little notebook if I were you.

All three books reviewed in one review by Vesta Irene