Update November 27, 2000 There are other lists of frequent surnames at the following locations: A legalább 10 000 esetben megtalálható családnevek elõfordulásuk sorrendjében - The chart of the most frequent Hungarian surnames, according to the official data of the Central Personal Data Processing Office at Hungary's Ministry of Interior in 1998. A leggyakoribb magyar családi nevek : az országos telefonkönyv találatai szerint - A list prepared by Prof. András Baranyai consisting of the most frequent Hungarian surnames, and the given names, as well. Results are very similar to these of my observations. Prof. Baranyai adds more comments. RadixIndex : Industry and trade directory of Hungary in 1891 : Most frequent surnames - This corpus is a spin-off of my RadixIndex database. The special feature of this listing is that one can find many alternative spellings for surnames.

A frequently asked question in genealogical research is the common / non common feature of surnames. This is true for Hungarian queries, too, so, I had decided to carry out a research that would result in listing the most frequent Hungarian ones. The research has been finished now, and I can present my findings.

Some words about the method that I followed. The 1997/3 issue of the phone directory of Hungary on CD-ROM served as the input database. This CD-ROM includes some 2,300,000 phone numbers. Armed with a printed phone directory of a well-sized town (Pécs), I was picking and checking surnames from A to Z that seemed to have many occurences. The names that produced more than 1000 hits on the CD-ROM were put onto the list.

Here is a fictious sample of surname Varga to show what is included and what is not:

...	not included	...
Szabó Andrásné Varga Mária	not included	Mrs. Mária Szabó, nee Mária Varga (husband: András Szabó)
...	not included	...
Varga Adolf	included	persons with surname "Varga" start here
...	included	...
Varga Kft.	included	although instead of a person it is a firm ("Varga Ltd."), which is named after its founder/owner, it is included in the list
...	included	...
Varga Zsuzsanna	included	Susanne Varga ends the set of included entries
...	not included	...
Vigné Varga Éva	not included	Mrs. Vig, nee Eve Varga
...	not included	...

Having finished with letter Z the list comprises of some 250 names. So, here it is:

Prepared by Radix. January 6, 1998.