Personal name

• 1. Introduction

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  A personal name is the set of names by which an individual person or animal is known. Laurence Watkins holds a record that sounds impossible. Since October 2025, his full legal name has carried 2,253 names. At the opposite extreme stands Teller, of the duo Penn and Teller. He was born Raymond Joseph Teller, then trimmed everything down, legally and socially, to a single word. On his driver's license his given name reads NFN, an initialism for no first name. Between those two poles sits a question every culture has answered differently. How do you fix a person to a name, and what does that name carry with it? In linguistics, this study has its own discipline, called anthroponymy. The word prosoponym itself comes from Ancient Greek, prosopon for person and onoma for name. Some peoples answer the question by adding name upon name. Others answer it by refusing names entirely. The Machiguenga of the Amazon, an isolated tribe, do not use personal names at all. And the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child declares that a child has the right to a name from birth.

• 2. When Surnames Arrived

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  China began using surnames in common life only from the 3rd century BC, before which they belonged mainly to the nobility. The timing differed sharply across the world. Korea and Vietnam adopted surnames over the next several centuries, while Japan did not see them become prevalent until the 19th century. Europe followed its own uneven clock after the Roman naming system was lost.

  France took up family names in the 13th century, and Germany in the 16th, but patronymic regions lagged far behind. The Scandinavian countries, Wales, parts of Germany, Russia and Ukraine clung to older customs much longer. France ordered priests to record surnames in baptismal entries in 1539, yet did not require them for Jews, who usually used patronymics, until 1808.

  Norway did not make surnames compulsory until 1923, and Iceland still does not use them for its native inhabitants. Across most of the Middle East and South Asia, surnames spread only as European influence took hold in the 19th century. The pattern shows naming as something imposed by record-keepers as much as chosen by families.

• 3. Threads And Chains

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  In the name James Smith, James is the first name and Smith is the surname, the simplest Western arrangement. Surnames in the West generally signal that a person belongs to a family, a tribe, or a clan, though the exact tie varies. A surname may be given at birth, taken upon adoption, or changed upon marriage.

  Arabic culture, along with regions across Africa and Asia, builds names as a chain instead. The given name connects to the father's name, then the father's father, and onward, usually ending with the family or clan name. To fit government-issued identification, the legal full name usually holds the first three names plus the family name at the end. Men and women follow the same construction, and a person's name does not change when they marry.

  Spain and most Latin American countries carry two surnames, the father's family name and the mother's. When the first is too common, Spaniards sometimes use the second alone, as with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, called simply Zapatero. Portuguese-speaking countries may stack two, three, or four surnames drawn from both parents, so António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres is known as António Guterres. Argentina, by contrast, usually keeps only the father's last name.

• 4. Named For A Parent

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  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky carried his father's given name, Ilya, embedded as a middle name. This is a patronymic, a surname or name element built from the father's given name. Björk Guðmundsdóttir takes her form from a father named Guðmundur, while Heiðar Helguson is named for a mother called Helga, a matronymic.

  Russia threads the patronymic through the middle name. All children of Ivan Volkov would be a first name followed by Ivanovich Volkov if male, or Ivanovna Volkova if female. The suffix -ovich means son of, -ovna means daughter of, and -a is usually added to a girl's surname. In formal Russian order the surname leads, as in Raskolnikov Rodion Romanovich.

  Iceland keeps the patronymic system alive, and middle names there often separate two similar people, as with Einar Karl Stefánsson and Einar Guðmundur Stefánsson. When patronymic peoples adopt other standards, the phrase often collapses into one word, producing surnames like Jacobsen, meaning Jacob's son. Scandinavian countries once named this way too, and the Faroe Islands recently reintroduced it as an option, while Finland keeps it legal for those of Icelandic ethnic naming.

• 5. Names As Fate

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  In Judaism, a name is held to be intimately connected with a person's fate, and adding a name on the sickbed may avert a particular danger. Among Ashkenazi Jews, taking the name of a living ancestor is considered bad luck, since the Angel of Death might mistake the younger person for their namesake. Sephardi Jews keep no such custom. Many Jews hold a Jewish name for use within the community and another for the Gentile world.

  The Inuit believe the souls of namesakes are one. They refer to junior namesakes not only by their names, the atiq, but also by a kinship title that applies across gender and generation, carrying no implication of disrespect or seniority. Chinese and Japanese emperors receive posthumous names.

  In some Polynesian cultures, a deceased chief's name becomes taboo. If the chief was named after a common object or concept, a different word must replace it in ordinary speech. These beliefs treat the name not as a label but as something with weight of its own, capable of protecting, endangering, or outliving the person who bore it.

• 6. Order And Disguise

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  Western name order places the family name last, the form used across Europe and in countries shaped by Western Europe, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It reaches far beyond the West too, into much of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Within alphabetic catalogs the family name still comes first, separated by a comma, as in Jobs, Steve, the lexical order favored by Western libraries.

  Eastern name order, family name first, began prominently in Ancient China and spread through the East Asian cultural sphere of China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Hungary uses it too, the only European country to do so, a convention that became standard in the 14th to 15th centuries. From the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japanese nobility adopted Western order for foreigners, and in 2020 the Government of Japan reverted to family name first in official documents. Japanese politician Taro Kono pressed the point, saying that if you can write Moon Jae-in and Xi Jinping in correct order, you can surely write Abe Shinzo the same way.

  Some people called anonyms hide their true names for fear of governmental prosecution or social ridicule, sometimes through a pseudonym. Feudal Europe ran the opposite direction, piling on names and lands. Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch Gilbert du Motier, known as the Marquis de la Fayette, held both the lands of Motier and La Fayette. A bare place name could even stand for its owner, so that Gloucester meant the Duke of Gloucester, and in the Royal Navy a ship's bare name meant its captain.

• 7. Names Beyond People

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  An Egyptian inscription from the 23rd century BC mentions a dog named Abuwtiyuw, placing the practice of naming pets back at least that far. Many owners give human names to their pets, a habit shown to reflect a human-like relationship with the animal. Names may point to appearance, personality, endearment, or a favorite celebrity, like Emily Brontë's dog Keeper or the historical Fido, meaning faithful.

  Dog breeders often work to themes tied to the litter number. In Germany and Austria, names run alphabetically, with A names for the first litter and B for the second, so a puppy called Dagmar belongs to a fourth litter. Researchers have argued that naming a pet lets them treat it as ontologically different from the unnamed laboratory animals they work with.

  A 2006 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota Bay, Florida, had names for each other, with a dolphin choosing its name as an infant. A 2024 article, drawing on elephant calls recorded in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, and the Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves between 1986 and 2022, used machine learning to find that elephants learn, recognize, and use individualized name-like calls. The right to a name, it turns out, may not be ours alone.