I know John Doe for sure
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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Mario Rossi is the default italian name
I saw a post elsewhere that Poland had “statistical Kowalski” as the typical person, but that (or I) could be mistaken.
João Silva in Portuguese
Jón Jónsson for men in Iceland, Anna or Guðrún Jónsdóttir would make sense for a woman
Mohammed Ahmed for Egypt
Ivanov Ivan Ivanovich in Russian
Max Mustermann for German
Ola Nordmann and Kari Nordmann in Norwegian for men and women respectively.
Juan Perez in Spanish.
Hong Gildong in Korea, which refers to the titular character of a novel from the Chosun dynasty. This name is used in every single example of “official documents” where one has to fill out their names such as exam papers, registration papers, online forms, and others. Funnily enough, it’s not even the top 5 most common surnames in Korea.
In Finnish it’s Matti Meikäläinen for men and Maija Meikäläinen for women.
Jan Novák in czech.
Juan Dela Cruz for Filipinos lol
Bobson Duggnut
Jón Jónsson in Iceland…
This comment section is great lol, learned more about language here then when I was a kid in spanish class
I can’t remember what the name is now but we kept getting different Indian women from a temp agency with the same last name and we thought they were all related, until I looked it up and it’s like the Indian version of Smith, but only for women. Men used a different common last name.
John Doe and Richard Roe are the oldest in English, but they’re deliberate ‘placeholder’ names used for legal documents – the US uses them pretty much exclusively for the deceased.
Joe Bloggs might be a better ‘everyman’ in more modern British English.
`Andi Budiman` is an Indonesian one.
In hungary a generic name would be Kis (Little) János. It’s from a well known short story. Another would be Kovács (Smith) János wich is just a common name.
For Polish, Jan Kowalski. Less famously, Adam Nowak, or any mix of those names.
Anders Svensson, or Sven Andersson. Sweden.
In Brazil we have Fulano, which is not even a real name, but we use it to talk about hypothetical people.
There’s also the variations Sicrano and Beltrano.
I believe Jens Jensen in Danish
John Citizen in Australia. He’s the example person the tax office use.
Ireland would be Paddy or Mary Murphy.
Jean Martin or Marie Martin are one of the equivalents in France (in a statistical view). There is other like Dupont or Dubois which without being the most common sound more common to the ears. I don’t think we really have an equivalent to John Does in reality, strictly speaking!
I had a guy try to give me a fake name for a fake tenant. Mohammed Singh.
He obviously thought, it’s a common first name & a common last name for ‘brown’ people. So there must be millions who have both so it would be impossible to trace or prove if they were real.
Jan Smit in Dutch
“Ion Popescu” in Romanian. Ion is kinda a romanian version of John and is translated as such sometimes, Popescu is just a very common name
Here are the top 10 most common first and last name combinations in the USA and the number of individuals with that combo, according to the study:
James Smith: 38,313
Michael Smith: 34,810
Robert Smith: 34,269
Maria Garcia: 32,092
David Smith: 31,294
Maria Rodriguez: 30,507
Mary Smith: 28,692
Maria Hernandez: 27,836
Maria Martinez: 26,956
James Johnson: 26,850
Ola Nordmann for Norway
For Welsh the generic name would be Dai Jones or Dafydd Jones
There’s a weird Hungarian one called Gipsz Jakab (Jacob Gypsum).
Motoko Kusanagi. Is unironically the japanese equivalent of “Jane Doe”. In Ghost in the Shell the reason the main character has that name is that in most continuities she is either intentionally obfuscating her real identity or like in the case of Stand Alone Complex was an orphan that didn’t remember her real name.
Jan Kowalski (Polish)
quite simillar to John Smith considering “kowal” means “blacksmith”
陳大文 in Hong Kong, or any variation:
Surname – As generic and common as possible, like 陳，黃，李, etc.
Name – 大 (big) or 小 (small), followed by Chinese words that tend to be simple in both writing and pronunciation
“Lee…you can’t go wrong with Lee.” – The Last Airbender.
Somehow stuck with me as common name among Chinese, not sure if true though.
Joe Bloggs in the UK
Janez/Marija Novak in Slovene
Philippines has Juan Dela Cruz