My last name isn’t terribly uncommon, but there’s a variant that differs by one letter. After various requests by people to know if I spell it the alternate way, I’ve gotten into the habit of (in commercial/legal transactions) proactively spelling it out before they even ask.
It pisses me off a bit because the alternate spelling is more unusual. Those other people should be the ones that have to clarify the spelling of their last name. 
Possibly he never even tried. Before punch cards, it really didn’t matter how you spelled your name. As soon as you move to a place where they don’t already know how your father is spelled, you get a new spelling.
Oh yeah, my last name can be spelled 4 different ways, that would stand for 4 different ‘things’. Noun or verb. And each way is pronounced exactly the same. I’ve thought of adding an accent over the last letter, to change the pronunciation, but that’s just going to muddy the waters.
Luckily though, it’s only 4 letters long.
True. When doing genealogy you need to look for variations in spelling. When the state didn’t take much interest in you, people spelled names pretty much as they had a mind to.
Yes, as I said in the other thread, my German family name is not common, even in Germany (although, properly pronounced there, I suspect most people would be able to spell it). I have spelled it all my life, providing sample words for the first two (“S like Steven, F like Frank”) which are an unusual combination outside of Germany.
Anyone remember that Nichols and May routine, where he’s on a pay phone trying to get a phone number from information (this was the early 60’s) for a person named Kaplan?
“Yes, that’s Kaplan, K-A-P-L-A-N.”
“Is that K as in knight, A as in aardvark, P as in pneumonia, L as in luscious, A as in aardvark again, N as in newel post, Kaplan?”
I have a seemingly-unnecessary double letter at the end of my surname. Imagine my name is “Boomm”; people really, really want to drop one of the M’s so I get a lot of Boom, Boome, Bloom, etc.
Census takers wrote down what they heard, and it was sometimes not even remotely what they were told.
My last name begins with one of the rhyming consonants: B, C, D, E, G, P, T, and V. Most people mishear what I’m saying. Also there are two vowels together that often get transposed.
My first name is easy, I think my last name is too, but I always have to spell it because it ends with a th. People always want to spell it with a ph or even an f, so I always do the t like Tom routine.
My daughter has a simple first name, but she sometimes gets the wrong pronunciation. It’s also spelled with only one consonant and 2 is common so she sees a lot of misspelling.
I had a friend named Wells, but when he said it, it sounded like Wales to anyone outside of Georgia.
Moving to Hawaii, the Witness Protection Program gave us all the last name Smith. I picked a common first name too - so no spelling problems.
Is that you, Jimmy (The Gent) Gambino?
My last name is easy to say and spell. It is spelled just as it sounds.
However there is a variation of the spelling of my name that includes a silent letter. Far, far fewer people who have my last name use that spelling. But there was a major celebrity who used that spelling. So particularly when I was younger if I didn’t spell my last name people would almost invariably spell it like the celebrity, even though his spelling was longer, non-phonetic and less common.
Luckily that celebrity is now largely forgotten and for the latter part of my life I’ve found people will spell my name correctly without me having to say anything.
My given names are very common with only one standard spelling. My last name is not uncommon, but has two common variants, so I tend to spell it so they know it’s the “S” version.
My first name is very common, but has two common spellings so I’m usually asked which one I use. My last name is extremely uncommon, but sounds vaguely like the name of a well-known ancient city, which causes most people to add an extra consonant near the beginning both in spelling and pronouncing it. I’m surprised and pleased when that doesn’t happen. In any case, I’ve spent my whole life spelling out my four-syllable last name (which doesn’t always help).
IANAG(erman)S(peaker), but…
I thought the beta-like character was a double s not a final or terminal s. Greek has a final s that looks like an s instead of a sigma and English used to have a final s which looked like an s rather than almost like an f. But the German character appears in the middle of words.
I really only had two name spelling problems in my life. My kindergarten teacher made name tags for our desks with our first names using the much more common spelling of my name, and I corrected mine. She insisted I was wrong and I came home crying my first day from school.
Much later our Computer IDs were our last names. Mine ends with a double letter but it’s 9 characters long and only 8 were allowed so I had to constantly tell people to add a letter.
My brother’s name ends with an l. His 5th grade teacher insisted that it must have two ls, which is the common spelling. She “corrected” it every time he wrote it and continued to use that spelling on his report card even after my mother had a talk with her about it. My mother had to go to the principal to finally settle the matter.
I have a surname that isn’t exactly common but it’s not unusual. Looking at the most common names in the U.S. it’s several hundred down. That still means there are quite a few people with the name. I don’t think it’s hard to spell but there are several alternative spellings that are all valid. People usually pick the wrong one. Today someone I worked with for almost 30 years spelled it wrong.
I guess I can’t be too upset with people misspelling my name. Found out a few years ago our last name was just one my grandfather decided to change his name to in his 30s.
In English “sz” is the pronunciation called “final-s”. It’s spelled ‘ss’ or ‘s’ at the end of a word.
The funky character is sz, so that’s appropriate, but the Germans don’t pronounce it that way anymore, which is why it was replaced with ss instead of sz.