Abstract
The author has been chiefly concerned with preparing the dictionary of contemporary Hungarian family names since the beginning of the 1970s. Official data, however, have long been unavailable to him. With the assistance of voluntary researchers (i.e. university students) the author still collected some 200,000 different family name forms and was about to edit them into an onomasticon, when the Central Office for Administrative and Electronic Public Services provided him with the complete list of all surnames which on 1st of January in 2007 were borne by Hungarian citizens. This collection will form the basis for the dictionary, in which every family name of more than 100 occurrences will be treated. The entries will contain the number of occurrences of each family name as well as the variant forms of spelling of each surname with reference to the number of occurrences of those name forms which display more than 10 appearances; furthermore, the etymology of the family names, their origin, meaning, development (the kind and meaning of the roots and suffixes), geographical distribution as well as their illustrious bearers will also be discussed. Sample entries taken from the dictionary in progress are presented for the first time in this paper.
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