About dirnames
What this site measures, where the figures come from, what they are not, and how to get a wrong one corrected.
This page is available in Spanish and English. The other language versions of the site serve the English text.
The question
"How many Miquel Sintes are there?" is a question people ask and had nowhere to answer. There are surname sites and there are first-name sites; what was missing was the crossing of the two, which is where the real question lives.
Where the data comes from
From a crawl of public web pages through namesdir.com. Every time a first name and a surname appear together on an open page, that appearance is counted. The count yields 4,824,606 distinct surnames, 3,110,605 first names and 387,908,752 name-surname pairs. The build currently served is from 2026-08-12.
What the figures are not
They are not a census. "1,114 Sintes" means the surname has been seen 1,114 times on web pages, not that 1,114 people carry it. The two are close enough to be worth measuring, and different enough that saying so here is not optional.
Three biases worth keeping in mind, because they are methodological and more data does not fix them:
- Whoever appears more on the web is counted more. A surname common in a profession with a large web presence comes out overrepresented.
- The language and country of the crawled pages tilt the distribution.
- One person quoted on a hundred pages counts a hundred times.
Why not everything is published
Of the 4,824,606 surnames crawled, 875,103 are published, and of the first names, 300,243. The rest is served if someone asks for it, but is not offered to search engines.
The threshold is twofold and was measured, not picked by eye: a surname gets in if it has been seen at least 100 times and alongside at least 15 distinct first names. Below that a page has too little inside it to say anything, and publishing hundreds of thousands of near-empty pages is the fastest way for a whole site to stop being worth trusting.
Origin, where it is inferred
Some pages say where a surname looks like it comes from. That comes from no register: it is inferred from the first names it appears with, because first names are far more local than surnames.
How often it is right is stated, which is what makes the figure mean something: the correct country comes first 66.7 % of the time, and is among the top five 90.6 %. That is why the pages show a list of countries with weights rather than a single country. When the figure does come from a source rather than from inference, the page says so in different words.
"Characteristic" first names
The most frequent first names for almost any Spanish surname start with María, José and Juan, so sorting by frequency makes every page look alike. Characteristic names are something else: the ones that appear far more often than their overall frequency would predict. Those are what actually tell one surname from another.
If you spot something wrong
Write to the address on the legal notice, quoting the URL. It is the fastest way to get it corrected, and also the way to ask for a page to be taken down.