What's In a Name?

[mabfan]

I've sometimes found my last name misspelled, and I tended to assume that this was party because it isn't really a common one. Well, I went to http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/dist.all.last and discovered that BURSTEIN is actually the 20,352nd most common surname in the USA. Here's what else I found:

BERNSTEIN is the 2,098th most common US surname
BURSTEIN is the 20,352nd most common US surname
BERSTEIN is the 38,576th most common US surname
BURNSTEIN is the 65,237th most common US surname

So I can understand why people might, on hearing my last name, spell it as BERNSTEIN...but why is it that people who see my name on the Internet tend to retype it as BURNSTEIN? That's far less common!

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

We might be. Some of the actors with the last name Burstein changed the spelling to Burstyn.