An anthroponym, being the definition of a person, is the means in which one is designated. Despite having been made official only in the second half of the nineteenth century, family names show some specific features reflecting social circumstances of remote times. Just a brief analysis of the present-day delexical onomastic word-stock entitles one to state that some family names come from common nouns denoting high offices that appeared in the middle of the fourteenth century, i.e. approximately in the time in which the high offices social system was brought into being. Most of the common names in question fell into disuse or went out of fashion simultaneously with the disappearance of their respective offices, surviving, however, as family names transmitted from generation to generation.