zlacker

The American presumption of having a single middle initial has always seemed weird to me. In NL, you can have as many names as you want, and some have a lot. Others have just a first and last name. I happen to have that single middle initial, but my wife and kids have two. Also, my wife's first name is not actually any of her legal names. Same with my dad and his brother and sister. "Calling name" is a common field on some official documents for this reason.

Most interesting case I've come across was a guy who just had one name. No surname or anything. He was once questioned by police (regarding a theft in the shop he worked in) and explained that his parents were "a bit weird". He was originally American, so apparently that's also a possibility there? And apparently the Dutch system allowed it, although the police seemed to struggle with it and may have duplicated his name.

>>mcv+(OP)
In NZ someone I know has a single name. Due to the constraints of the system, effectively he has no first name and only a surname. In things where a first and last name are required (I think the drivers licence system needed it), he uses "citizen" as a filler.

It can go the other extreme too of course: https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360848808/worlds-longest-nam...

>>mcv+(OP)
In America (well in my state, everywhere does it slightly differently) you can't really give people multiple middle names, all you really do is give them a single middle name with a space in it.

source: gave my children fancy names

>>eythia+1e
I used to work for a university in Australia, our solution to mononymous students was to put their single name in both first name and surname fields. So if your name was just Mayawati, we'd put you down as Mayawati Mayawati.

Some US bureaucrats seem to like FNU (First Name Unknown) or LNU (Last Name Unknown). So one encounters mononymous Americans whose first name is Fnu or last name is Lnu. A while back I had a coworker whose surname was Fnu – I believe her legal paperwork had Fnu as her first name, but she got IT to swap her firstname and lastname in our corporate systems, because she didn't want people addressing her as Fnu.