Oddest Last Names You've Come Across (1 Viewer)

[Tom Rhea]

Just remembered my 12th grade science teacher: Mr. Miracle. I always suspected he was a superhero by night.

 

[Jassen M. West]

My boss goes to a Dr. Frank N. Stein. maybe that explains why my boss is a nut.

jay

 

[Charles J P]

A lady I ran into doing an audit has a last name prounounced oz-mun but its spelled Assman.

 

[Bill Cowmeadow]

I kinda like my name.

I used to live on a street called Green Acres.

Cows terrified me as a child!

 

[Cees Alons]

In my country there are several very "funny" names - the jokes would sadly enough escape you if I printed them. They stem from the fact that during the French occupation (by Napoleon), people had to choose official family names - and believed it wasn't a lasting thing. So some laughed their heart out by making fools of the French (that's what they thought), but instead annoyed their offspring with names sounding like "butts", "born naked" or "pee-a-lot".
My choice would be the English name Cholmondolly. I was told it is pronounced "Chomly".
Cees
PS:
Schermerhorn and Posthumus are normal and common Dutch names.
Mark, I think we once went through this before, but the "k" you are referring to, should actually be a "ggg", sounding like a guttural sound between "k" and "h". It's a very common sound in Dutch, but rather difficult to most other countrymen (it's present in modern Hebrew too). When the last World War was over and they wanted to find Germans who tried to pose like Dutchmen, people were forced to say "Scheveningen" (a little town near "The Hague" - pronounced as "De Hah-ggg" over here, BTW). A German would say "Shay-vuh-neengen". We say "Sgggay-vuh-ningen" ("ng" is nasal n-sound like in "ring").
If you like to hear how "Schermerhorn" is pronounced in Dutch, I could place a .wav file on my website and give you a link.
C.

 

[Jeffrey Noel]

My sister's old boss' name is Richard Dick. I wonder if anyone ever called him Dick Dick to his face?

 

[KeithH]

I once met someone named Anne Sexsmith. What I always wanted to say to her was, "Is that your name or is that what you do?"

 

[Carlo_M]

Girl who used to be secretary for the Engineering Dept. of the place I went school: Mi Suk Kwon. (sound it out) Swear to god. It was on her desk tag.

 

[GARY C]

I only have two that I can think of.
One was a guy I worked with in manufacturing who was originally from England by the name of Les Moore.
I also met a Mary Chambers during College, but only a select few people know her middle name which was Lynn. Not so funny in unless you know about some, umm... 'other' movies.

 

[Greg Rakaska]

My drill sergeant's name was Ben Dover :b
It was the name he chose to have on his name tag, when I suppose, he could have chosen Benjamin.
There was a law firm here in Indianapolis named: Lynch, Roach, and Belch
which I always thought was kinda funny!

 

[andrew markworthy]

Just remembered that my wife has a cousin called Ian Michael Lovely (IM Lovely).

There are a whole host of unusual English surnames (mostly from rural areas) - Ramsbottom, Cakebread, Gotobed, Cocks. I believe most of them derive from modern pronunciations of older names which were far more 'sensible'.

 

[KeithH]

I just remembered that I met someone in a D&D group once named Richard Guy. As he wasn't the most pleasant person in the world and didn't last in our group, my friends and I liked to call him "Dick Man".

 

[Artur Meinild]

Ben Dover

LOL, this is even better than Mike Hunt!

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

My choice would be the English name Cholmondolly. I was told it is pronounced "Chomly".

Place names in the English-speaking world can be a little odd, especially the older ones. One problem is that a major shift in pronunciation, which happens from time to time in most languages, coincided with the introduction of printing - which tends to standardize spelling. So just as people were ceasing to pronounce the "k" in words like "knife" and "knight", their spellings were being locked-in. Long words tend to get worn down over time, but again, the spellings can become fossilized. (And orthography changes, too. The "Ye" in signs like "Ye Olde Tobacco Shoppe" isn't supposed to be pronounced as "Yee" Although there used to be a personal pronoun spelled "why-ee" and pronounced "Yee", there was also a character in the English alphabet that looked like a "Y", but actually represented the sound "TH". So "Ye Olde Tobacco Shoppe" was simply "The Old Tabacco Shop")
By the way, I believe the pronunciation of your example is "Chumly". See also "Wooster" Massachusetts (Worcester.) An oddity is Pontefract Castle. For years (maybe centuries) the name was pronounced as "Pomfrey", but an influx of American tourist in recent years reportedly led the tour guides to give up on the traditional sound of the name and go along with the tourists in pronouncing it as it is spelled. I guess the notion that "the customer is always right" is alive and well in the U.K. (Besides, it probably save a lot of time and pointless arguments.)
Regards,
Joe

 

[Matt Kasprzak]

I once knew a girl whose last name was Pekar, and her father owned a liquor store (it's still there, btw).
Pekar Liquors.
The ironic thing is she was a nymphomaniac.

 

[andrew markworthy]

Joseph, there's another part to the thing about Pontefract. In the UK at least there's a type of candy called a Pontefract cake, which is a soft piece of liquorice about the size and shape of a small coin, which was derived from liquorice grown near Pontefract (duh ...). People asking for it would pronounce the name as it was spelt, and so the 'incorrect' pronunciation began to become standard, a process accelerated by tourists.

A related example is another ancestral home called Holker Hall (about half way between Lancaster and Barrow-in-Furness, if you're planning a visit). The 'correct' pronunciation is 'Hooker Hall', but for some reason this gave American tourists the completely wrong idea about the place. Now even most locals pronounce it as 'Holker'.

Incidentally, the English Worcester is pronounced 'wusster'.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Incidentally, the English Worcester is pronounced 'wusster'.

The American one, too, at least by some Americans. The accents differ considerably in New England (and within the states there) so there are serveral slight variants. I typed it out as "wooster", but I've probably heard "wusster" at least as often.
Can't imagine why people weren't sure about "hooker hall"
Speaking of names that frighten tourists. The bus station in the city of Annapolis is officially called the Annapolis Bus Terminal. (Or at least it was in the late 70s, when I lived there.) Next to the bus station is a diner. The diner is called "The Terminal Restaurant" I don't know if this indicates wit or ignorance on the part of whoever named the place, but would you eat there?
Regards,
Joe

 

[Greg Haynes]

We had a girl named Rashada Rashada at my work. When I saw her name I thought it was a typo. I don't know what the heck her parents were thinking.

 

[James Reyes]

The other day I had an asian customer named Pum Kin.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Not odd names per se, but in the last couple of weeks I've spoken to the following people on my telephone tech support job: Sandra Bullock, Robert Conrad and Tom Petty - none of them the famous ones. When a Faith Hill called I nearly offered to fly to her house and fix the problem myself. Oh, and yesterday I got a call from a woman named "Charo" (She pronounces it "Sharo")
Regards,
Joe