What's in a name?

Here in the research team we're knee-deep in preparation and writing for the 2010 edition of the Civil Society Almanac at the moment, but I thought I'd take a moment to share an interesting titbit from the work we've been doing so far. We get a feed of data from the Charity Commission of the publically available information from the register of charities.

One interesting table on there gives the names of all charity trustees in the country. Usually these names have a title attached, and it's quite fun to look at how many times each title appears - the top 15 are shown in the table below. As might be expected the top is dominated by Mr and Mrs, but with good representation of Reverends, Professors, Sirs, Lords and Ladies.

Further down the list we find Bishops, Brigadiers, Rabbis, Monsignors and a wide range of military, aristocratic and religious titles. I also looked at suffixes - according to the data there are 2,500 MBEs, 1,982 OBEs and 1,327 OBEs - as well as 226 MPs (although more MPs may be on the list without their suffix).

Finally, the most popular first name is John (occurs 39,900 times) and the most popular surname is Smith (occurs 9,700 times)!