My, Mey

I have a last name that is often misspelled. Most people who have this problem get irritated about it at one point or another. I confess to getting a little impatient when trying to check into a hotel or conference and they can't find my reservation/registration because they are looking under "Mey" instead of "My" (despite the fact that I have handed them my id or even spelled it out). But for the most part, I've just come to accept it as part of life's daily rituals.

Even more often, I've taken to viewing it as a little game in which I just say my name and see which way the person will assume it is spelled. It is no stretch to say that over 90% of the time when hearing the name "Myers," the listener will assume that it is spelled "Meyers." I've always found this a little curious because I've known a lot more people named "Myers" in my life than "Meyers." Of course, my sample is a little biased, but it really didn't seem as if 90% of the people named "Meyers" or "Myers" were of the MEY variety.

So, I looked it up. And you can too at the census bureau's tabulation of names (Last, Male, Female). Here we have a rank-ordered tabulation of names from the 1990 census. No word as to when the 2000 update is due. When you look at the list of last names, the usual suspects pop up in the top ten. I've listed the names and the percentage of the U.S. population that have that name.

1. SMITH          1.006
2. JOHNSON        0.810
3. WILLIAMS       0.699
4. JONES          0.621
5. BROWN          0.621
6. DAVIS          0.480
7. MILLER         0.424
8. WILSON         0.339
9. MOORE          0.312
10. TAYLOR        0.311

If you search down, you can find Meyers and Myers:

101. MYERS     .083
576. MEYERS    .020

Wow! There are 4 times as many Myers as Meyers! And yet, people automatically assume the Meyers spelling. There has got to be some kind of availability heuristic working here, but what could it be? Maybe the "singular" MEY version is more popular than the MY version:

5393. MYER     .002
216.  MEYER    .048

Yep, that's part of the story. In fact, there are more in the Meyer clan than there are in the Meyers clan. But it still doesn't add up. There are still more total Mye* people (.085% of the population) than Meye* people (.068%). But some how, the Mey version has got to be more present in people's minds. Why? It could be famous people, but I we've got them on that too. We have Bristol-Myers, Myers-Briggs, Mike Myers, and Fort Myers. Who do they have?

It just doesn't make sense. The only thing I have been able to land on is that perhaps it is all the trailing –meyer suffixes that make the difference (top three: Neimeyer, Wehmeyer, Borgmeyer) But the My's have their version of this too (top three: Overmyer, Stottlemyer, Wittenmyer). Obviously, we are already getting into some pretty rarified area already and unfortunately, the Census name report gets a little sketchy here—for any name that is less than .001 of the population, it is reported as .000, so the numbers aren't too definitive.

But there is something to this. Of the 88799 names reported, there are 102 names that end in -meyer, while there are only 24 that end in -myer. Each of these is .001 percent of the population or less, so it might even things out, but I still don't think it is enough to produce the 90% MEY assumption.