word choice - Second name or Surname in British English


I have recently been told by a Londoner that "second name" is the most common way of referring to one's surname. She explained that it arose from the fact that most people just use their first and last names, therefore "second name" and "last name" became synonyms.


This has given me some food for thought and I've become curious on a couple of points:



  1. Is this practice in use elsewhere?

  2. Does it cause misunderstandings when a person happens to have a middle name and, therefore, second and last name aren't coincident?

  3. So, in this fictitious name, what could be called what?

    • Mary (first name)

    • Sue (middle name / ?second name? or ?second given name?)

    • Smith (surname / family name / last name / ?second name?)




On a slightly different note, when non-English names that have multiple surnames are involved, how would one refer to them? For example: Ana Maria Silva dos Santos Pereira, where "Ana Maria" correspond to 2 given names and "Silva dos Santos Pereira" correspond to 3 family names (typically inherited from both mother and father's side).


4) Would everything in between "Ana" and "Pereira" be considered middle names?



Answer



Your London friend is sadly misinformed. Here iss the British English only corpus from Google NGrams:


This Google Ngrams chart, which starts from the year 1800, shows that


So Brits definitely stick with surname, but in the United States of America, there has been a noticeable shift towards last name in recent decades:


This Google Ngrams chart, which starts from the year 1800, compares his surname, his second name and his last name. It shows that His surname was preferred until the 1980s, when Last Name surpassed it, although it should be noted that Last Name almost reached parity with it during the 1940s. Second name and last name were both more or less equally unpopular until the early 1900s, when Last Name began a general upward trend in popularity.



Probably most Anglophones have one middle name, but there are plenty of people who only have a first name and a surname. And many people have two or more of what I've never heard called anything other than middle names (first and middle names collectively are called forenames).



Over recent decades, people increasingly tend to avoid the religious implications of christian name. Somewhat surprisingly to me, it appears first name is more favoured in the United States of America than Britain, but I suppose that is more by analogy with last name than because of secularist leanings.


This nGrams chart, starting from the year 1800, compares his first name, his christian name, and his Christian name. It shows that Christian name was more popular until the 1910s, when first name achieved parity. Christian name was regained some preference during the following years, but was overtaken by first name by around the 1930s. Christian name with a lowercase c was about as popular as Christian name with an uppercase C during 1800, but generally declined until it was even less popular than last name was during the 1850s, and it continued to decline in popularity since then.



Forms such as given, birth, married name etc., are relatively uncommon, in that they're only normally used in contexts where they're needed to disambiguate. Usually, given name(s) are forename(s) your parents gave you at birth, if these aren't what you call yourself in later life (for whatever reason). That can also apply to birth name, but this is also used to contrast with the married name (most women still adopt their husband's surname, which may also be indicated by Mrs. Smith, née Jones).



As the charts show, second name is quite rare compared to surname (and last name in the US). Here is a link to a chart showing it is equally rare compared to first name, Christian name, and middle name. Partly because it's uncommon, it has no established unambiguous definition. Here is a typical online entry:



second name (second names, plural) Someone's second name is their family name, or the name that comes after their first name and before their family name.
(where family name is just a somewhat less common alternative to surname).



Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (4th edition) © 2003



And a "real" dictionary (such as the Oxford English Dictionary) does not even bother to define such a vague collocation. As various comments indicate, it could also mean a nickname, stagename, alias, nom-de-plume, etc. In fact, to different people in different times and places, second name can mean just about any name or part of a name that's not the first name. It is no more meaningful than other name outside of context (personally I think it sounds a bit childish and uneducated, but that's just me! :).


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