Can You Change Your Legal Name to Just Have a First or Last Name if You Wanted To?
Mononymous people, or people with a singular given name, were once the norm throughout
much of the world, but are rare in modern times, particularly in the West.
As such, most of our infrastructure is built to accommodate people with at least two names-
invariably a first name and a surname with the occasional embarrassingly antiquated middle
name in homage to some ancestor or other for good measure.
Given this, what difficulties do people with only a singular given name face in a society
so built to favour the duonymous and trinymous (which Google tells me aren’t actually words
but I now officially declare such), and is there anything stopping polynymous people
from having a name-change operation to become mononymous?
To begin with, the idea of surnames, while popular today, is not universally held on
Earth and there are still cultures where children are simply given a singular name at birth.
An example of this is Indonesian and Javanese culture where the mononymous are common.
The most well-known example of this is likely Indonesia’s first ever President, Sukarno.
Despite having only a singular given name, Western journalists in the 1960s sometimes
felt it necessary to make up some random second name when writing about President Sukarno
to save having to take the time to explain that mononymous people are common in Indonesian
culture.
As you can imagine, within cultures where a singular name isn’t unheard of, the government
has no problem issuing IDs to mononymous individuals and there exist examples of Indonesian passports
with only one name listed.
Their systems also easily account for the polynymous among us.
For instance, in their passports, rather than having separate boxes for a last name and
any other given names, they only have a singular box in which a person’s full name, however
many distinct entities it might include, is written.
In places like America or the UK, such forms are not always so accommodating.
This is particularly an issue that impacts foreign students wishing to study in the West,
especially when they’re asked to fill in digital forms that don’t allow you to proceed
without filling in all the boxes.
So what do mononymous people do in these cases?
Since not all digital forms are created equally, there’s not really a singular, all-encompassing
answer we can give about what happens in these situations.
However, the general methods employed here seem to be the tedious route- people are required
to either call the institution personally to explain and have an administrator bypass
the restrictions manually, or alternatively for some forms a standard character set like
“NFN” can be put in, understood to stand for “No First Name”.
That said, this seems to be more of an issue for those in the US more than the UK as many
places, like British universities, allow foreign students hailing from cultures where singular
names are common to simply write their full given name in one of the available boxes and
leave the others blank without the back end coding complaining to the user about it.
Given such difficulties for the mononymous, most probably would avoid wanting to switch
from a perfectly form-acceptable duonymous name to a mononymous.
But if you wanted to, could you legally trim the fat of your name and go it solo?
As it turns out, in many cases, yes, though with some stipulations.
For instance, in the UK where the rules are a little less nebulous than, say, the United
States, the official website of the Deed Poll Office explains to readers that …
You are free to change any part of your name — you can change your first name, your middle
names, and your surname.
You can add or remove names, and you can change the spelling of names.
The website goes on to acknowledge that while British Citizen can change their name to virtually
anything they like, whenever they want, for any reason by simply filling in a form and
paying a small fee, they strongly advise people to not change their name for frivolous reasons.
Then again, they note in the same paragraph that there’s not really anything they can
do if you do choose to do this.
As for what an individual can choose to call themselves, there are only a handful of official
rules in place and they’re basically the same rules enforced when you choose to name
a baby.
Basically, as long as you don’t choose a name that is intentionally offensive or promotes
hatred or illegal behaviour or the like, you can change it to whatever you want.
On top of this, the website notes that for technical reasons names can’t be over 300
characters long, contain numbers or symbols or feature diacritical‌‌‌‌ ‌‌‌‌marks‌‌‌‌
(umlauts, accents, etc).
This isn’t to say that they can’t contain these things in terms of if you want to write
them that way, it’s just that they won’t appear that way on official documents like
passports.
As for choosing to go by a singular name, again the Deed Poll Office acknowledges that
it can do nothing to stop a person choosing to go mononymous, stating:
There is no law preventing you from being known by a single name, or mononym — that
is, a surname only, with no forenames — and HM Passport Office should accept such a name,
although they may be more sceptical of your application.
In such cases, individuals will be issued passports in which the field for forename
will contain three large X’s and an official observation explaining what’s going on.
Though the HM Passport Office is a different and distinct entity to the Deed Poll Office,
British Citizens wanting to change their name who hold British Passports are required to
convince both offices that their name change isn’t frivolous and as such, changing your
name to a mononym is more difficult in these circumstances unless you hail from a culture
where it is common.
In which case, the Passport Office should process your application without issue.
The Deed Poll Office also advises citizens that while it’s not illegal to go by a single
name, it makes the process of identifying oneself substantially more difficult and asks
people to consider the difficulties they will face in day-to-day life before making a decision
to go by a mononym.
Across the pond in America, changing your name is a more complicated affair, in part
because each US state has its own rules about how one should go about this.
That said, for the most part, the rules are similar to the ones in the UK, in that you
can generally change your name to whatever you want, within reason- don’t be offensive,
don’t try to change your name to something unintelligible, don’t try to change your
name to a trademarked phrase or a celebrity’s name (unless you can convince the powers that
be that you have a legitimate reason for doing so), etc.
The process of changing your name, however, is an altogether more litigious and complex
affair, usually requiring you to appear in court and have the details of your name change
published to become official.
Exceptions to this latter rule include cases where an individual has been a victim of domestic
violence.
As for changing your name to a mononym, this is generally impossible in the US in all but
the most exceptional of circumstances.
As a result, only a handful of US citizens have Passports listing a single name.
Along with natives of cultures where singular names are common, people known to be legally
recognised by a single name include the singer Cher and latter (silent) half of the magician
duo, Penn and Teller.
The reason changing your name to a mononym is so difficult in the US is because (in most
States), as mentioned, changing your name requires you to physically appear in front
of a judge and justify the name change.
Such a judge is unlikely to grant a request to allow a person to go by a mononym due to
the inherent difficulties having such a name can cause.
For people like Cher and Teller, who’ve been near-universally known by their respective
mononyms for decades, this isn’t as much of an issue as for those of us who can’t
just throw lots of money at any problems that subsequently pop up; the fact that they’re
both famous also probably helped their case with their respective judges.
For those curious about what Cher and Teller’s passports say in the box listing their first
name, rather than a series of X’s like in the UK, US passports instead put the aforementioned
abbreviation “NFN” (No First Name).
Interestingly, 46 states allow a citizen to bypass part of this process and change their
name “by usage”.
This basically means if you go by a given name for long enough and can prove that fact,
you can adopt that as your new name, though you’ll still need a court order to make
it official for a passport or the like.
When this happens, similar difficulties to those mentioned above can arise.
So all things considered, it’s probably just easier to stick with the names we’re
given.