The linguist Adam Aleksic, who maintains an entertaining social media presence as @etymologynerd, has noted that the way we save people’s names in our phones with descriptive information—Bob Plumber; Jessica Tinder; Marina EX! DO NOT ANSWER!—is simply a rehashing of the way last names in the West came about in the first place. While there is evidence of family names and patronyms being used in the ancient world, they really took off in the Middle Ages in England when a population increase, and the need for accurate recordkeeping, led people to distinguish one another by their place of origin, job or other notable personal traits. 

If there were two Johns in the village, one might be from the wood and the other was the blacksmith—hence the proliferation of Hills, Smiths and Bakers. Only over time did these monikers become hereditary. Some surnames simply reflected the name of the father: Once upon a time all Johnsons were John’s son. In Iceland, practically every name is made by adding the Icelandic spelling of “daughter” or “son” to the father’s first name (Björk Jónsdóttir, for example).

As last names evolved, they became a way of distinguishing someone’s class and status as well as their occupation or provenance. If a “von” in German or “de” in French preceded the surname it indicated noble lineage; the Napoleonic admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve shrewdly dropped his “de” when he took up with the revolutionaries. In English, a double-barreled last name was another indicator of status—a sign that the wife’s maiden name was too important to lose when she married. 

Today, however, it’s increasingly hard to tell much from a last name. Hyphenated names now tend to reflect a feminist, rather than aristocratic, desire not to give the child only the father’s name, and many newlyweds create a whole new family name in the quest for equality. There has also been so much intermingling and migration that a surname is no longer a reliable indicator of provenance or class. And—as is demonstrated every time a Western sports commentator tries to wrap their head around a Korean name—many cultures have entirely different conventions.