Middle Names Reveal More Than You Think

In 2011, demographic researchers across America realized something surprising: Census forms had a lot of spots left blank. When one person fills it out for the whole household, they might skip certain sections—especially the middle-name column. Sixty percent of people left out the middle names of their extended family members, and nearly 80 percent omitted those of roommates they weren’t related to. Respondents weren’t trying to keep secrets. Much of the time, they just didn’t know the middle names of the people they lived with.

Middle names occupy a strange space in American society. We use them most in bureaucratic contexts. They show up on driver’s licenses and passports, but they aren’t required when booking plane tickets. You probably don’t include it in your signature, and you probably don’t put it in your social-media profiles. For many of us, the name feels like a secret. Only about 22 percent of Americans think they know the middle names of at least half of their friends or acquaintances, according to a poll conducted for The Atlantic by The Harris Poll. Yet you still might be offended if a spouse or a close friend forgets yours. Knowing this seemingly benign piece of information has become emblematic of your connection. “She don’t even know your middle name,” Cardi B laments about an ex-partner’s new fling in her song “Be Careful.” But the intimacy you miss out on when you don’t know someone’s middle name can be more than symbolic. The names can be Trojan horses of meaning about ourselves or our ancestors, couriers of overlooked parts of our identity.

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This wasn’t always the case. Middle names were probably an export of medieval Italy’s tradition of double first names, the historian Stephen Wilson wrote in The Means Of Naming: A Social History. Over the next few centuries, the practice of giving children two names ricocheted across the European elite. In the late 19th century, it gained traction in America, predominantly among the upper class. It spread across social strata during the early 1900s as part of the rise of life insurance and Social Security cards. Prior to World War I, many Americans didn’t maintain consistent spellings of their first and last names. But with more official documents tracking who they were, spelling their names the same way each time and tacking on an extra one to distinguish family members with the same name just made sense. The result was a veritable takeover: By the late 1970s, 75 percent of Americans had middle names.

In many other cultures, middle names either don’t exist or don’t serve the same purpose. Countries such as Japan, Korea, and China don’t have anything that directly correlates to American middle names, though many Americans with family from these countries give their kids one anyway. Meanwhile, in other communities in the United States, middle names are quite prominent. You might know a neighbor’s middle name, for instance, if you live in the American South. Southerners are more likely to go by their middle name than people living in any other part of the country, probably because they more often hand down the same first name across multiple generations and need a differentiator. Others in the region may opt for compound first-and-middle names, such as “Sarah Beth.” These are also common in many Hispanic families.

But for many of the rest of us, hearing our middle name can seem oddly formal. It’s jarring when a parent uses it to scold us, because doing so injects a dose of ceremony and distance into a typically close relationship, Wijnand van Tilburg, a professor at the University of Essex, in England, told me. Some of us have become so hardwired to associate our middle name with wrongdoing, in fact, that even seeing it written down makes us less indulgent. In one study, participants were less likely to want a product that might be seen as a guilty pleasure—in this case, a bottle made to hold sugary drinks—after they imagined their full name, middle name included, engraved on it.

Despite these formal, bureaucratic connotations, a variety of factors—be they idiosyncratic preferences or deep familial meaning—shape why these names are chosen, transforming them into far more than legalese. For some parents, the names are a creative exercise. Many of the most popular middle names in America—such as Marie and Ann, which ranked in the top-10 middle names for every single decade from 1900 until 2015—may have been chosen for their pleasing poetic rhythm, Sophie Kihm, the editor in chief of the baby-naming site Nameberry, told me. Metaphor-driven names such as Moxie are taking off too, as are more artistic ones, such as Symphony and Rembrandt. Kihm is also seeing a lot of animal names, such as Hawk and Lynx; the rapper Macklemore gave his daughter the middle name Koala. Others use the spot for something more personal. Forty-three percent of middle names honor a family member, compared with just 27 percent of first names. Indeed, middle names are commonly used to acknowledge where you came from. Many middle-class Mexican American families have chosen to give their children an English first name and a Spanish middle name; Kihm told me she’s seen many Asian Americans do the same in their respective languages.  

[Read: The rise of gender-neutral names isn’t what it seems ]

In some cases, the middle name might reflect what parents would be most drawn to, if they weren’t concerned with social scrutiny. “People are willing to take bigger risks there than they are with the first name,” Kihm told me. Although scholars have observed that political tensions can trickle down into how parents name their kids, the virtue signals rarely spread to middle names. In America, the rise of anti-French sentiment during the early years of the Iraq War led to a marked decline in French first names—but there was no discernible impact on middle names. Recently, even as gender-neutral first names have become common, middle names have quietly subverted gender norms further. Kihm pointed out that girls are getting more traditionally masculine middle names, and vice versa. James, for instance, has become a popular middle name for girls; Rihanna recently gave her son the middle name Rose.

This slot, then, is a place for parents to hide their values in plain sight. Sometimes we seem to expect the middle name to reveal something fundamental. Look no further than the TV and movie trope in which a character announces that some meaningful word—subtle, courageous, slick—is actually their middle name. (In Austin Powers, it goes: “Danger is my middle name.”) Your middle name, in this understanding, is a secret weapon, a raw reflection of your personality or of a hidden skill. This has filtered into actual naming trends in the past decade, as middle names with symbolic meaning such as Love have become more popular, according to Kihm.

Middle names can’t telegraph all of who we are. But maybe sharing them feels so intimate because they carry a small piece of us. More than being a few letters printed on your ID, they’re a window into your family history, your parents’ tastes, and sometimes even their aspirations for who you might become.