We show you a random name (forename + surname), and you have to guess which European country it's from. You can see some basic statistics about your games on the Statistics tab and read more about the project on the About tab.

NameguessR is a simple game in which you have to guess which European country a person is from based on his or her full name. My goal is to help people discover the beauty of names and the enormous diversity that exists in names.

For each European country, I collected the 100 most common forenames and surnames. Then I created all the possible combinations (i.e., 100 * 100 = 10 000) of full names. Finally, I selected 100 full names to be used in the game.

Some notes:

1. I removed duplicates–that is, cases when a full name could be from more than one country. In practice, this means that, for example, some common German names might not appear in the game because they are also common in Austria.
2. Some countries use gendered surnames, so it might be the case that a male forename is matched with a female surname and vice versa.
3. I removed some small European countries (Vatican, Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco).
4. Some of the full names can be relatively rare even when both the surname and the forename are common in isolation. For example, in a country with two ethnicities, the surname can be from one ethnicity, while the forename from the other one.

1. Forebears has a large database of names where you can browse the most common names in countries and search for specific forenames and surnames
2. Guide to Names and Naming Practices (2006) is a guide produced by the UK to help authorities deal with names from unfamiliar countries

Please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @banki_daniel.