Download a range of surnames by rank from Census.gov. It calls the Census.gov Surname API (you must have an API key from the government). Here is a link to the API https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets/surnames.2010.html. I chose to call the top 100,000 surnames due to frequency. Page 4 of this explanatory PDF has an excellent frequen…

census_surnames.py

import csv
import os
import requests

CENSUS_API_KEY = os.environ.get("CENSUS_API_KEY", "")
CENSUS_SURNAME_URL = "https://api.census.gov/data/2010/surname"

params = {
    "key": CENSUS_API_KEY,
    "get": "NAME,COUNT",
    "RANK": "1:100000"
}

resp = requests.get(CENSUS_SURNAME_URL, params)

last_names = resp.json()

with open("lastnames.csv", "w") as outfile:
    writer = csv.writer(outfile)
    writer.writerows(last_names)