Middle Name Pride Day

What the day is

Middle Name Pride Day is observed on March 7. It asks you to admit to yours, which for a great many people takes some persuading.

Origin and background

Middle names are not ancient in English. For most of English history people had one given name and a surname, and the practice of adding a second given name spread from continental Europe, gaining ground among the English-speaking gentry in the eighteenth century and becoming general in the nineteenth. It arrived partly as a way to carry a mother's family name, a godparent's name or a benefactor's name without displacing the first.

That function survives. The middle name is where families put the obligation: the grandparent who had to be honored, the surname that would otherwise vanish, the saint. It absorbs the pressure the first name could not, which is exactly why so many are unfashionable, and why so many people never use them.

Conventions differ widely. Spanish-speaking naming usually carries two surnames, from father and mother, rather than a middle given name, and Russian names include a patronymic used in formal address in a way no English middle name is.

In practice the name lives mostly in paperwork, where its function is disambiguation: it separates people who share a common first name and surname, which is why it appears on passports, banking records and court documents. That makes consistency matter more than pride, since a name written in full on one document, as an initial on another and omitted from a third produces mismatches that automated checks now catch, most familiarly at airline check-in. Oddly, the initial also seems to carry status. Experiments presenting identical text under names with and without a middle initial found the versions carrying one rated as more competent.

The best-known middle initial in American history stood for nothing at all. Harry S. Truman's parents chose the letter to please two grandfathers without favoring either.

How to take part

• Say yours out loud, which for most people is the hardest part.
• Find out where it came from. It is usually somebody specific.
• Check your name is recorded consistently across passport, bank and travel bookings.
• If you have always disliked your first name, try going by the middle one.
• Look up the Truman S, which really does stand for nothing.