By Anjali Nayak
In 2011, demographic researchers across the United States realized something surprising: census forms had a lot of spots left blank. When one person fills it out for the whole household, they often skip certain sections—most notably the middle-name column. 60% 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. Most of the time they simply didn’t know the middle names of the people they lived with.
Middle names occupy a strange space in American society. They are often reserved for only the most bureaucratic contexts: showing up on driver’s licenses or passports. However, they aren’t required when booking plane tickets or purchasing ‘big-ticket items.’ You probably don’t include yours in your signature, and you probably don’t put it in your username. For many of us, the name feels like a secret. Yet, you still might be offended if a spouse or a close friend forgets yours. All of a sudden, knowing this seemingly benign and mindless piece of information has become emblematic of your connection. In fact, Cardi B says it best, “she don’t even know your middle name.”
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 or meanings to do with ourselves or our ancestors, couriers of overlooked parts of our identity.
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 amongst the European elite. In the late 19th century, it gained importance in America, predominantly among the upper class. It spread across the social strata during the early 1900s as part of the rise of life insurance and Social Security cards. The result was a veritable takeover: by the late 1970s, 75% of Americans had middle names.
Though in most other cultures, middle names either do not exist or don’t serve any 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. Southerners are more likely to go by their middle name than people living in any other part of the country, simply 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-last names such as “Sarah Beth.”
But for many 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. On the other hand, middle names might reflect what parents would be drawn to if they weren’t concerned with social scrutiny. People are willing to take bigger risks there than they are with middle names. Scholars have observed that political tensions 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. The most widespread middle name of “Mary Anne” continued to reign supreme.
Instead, I see the slot as a place for parents to hide their values in plain sight. Sometimes we seem to expect the middle name to reveal something ultimately fundamental. Look no further than the classic trope in which a character announces that some meaningful word—subtle, courageous, slick—is actually their 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.
Middle names can’t fully explain 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.