Given name in the context of "Middle name"

A legal name or wallet name is the name that identifies a person for legal, administrative and other official purposes. A person's legal birth name generally is the name of the person that was given for the purpose of registration of the birth and which then appears on a birth certificate (see birth name), but may change subsequently. Most jurisdictions require the use of a legal name for all legal and administrative purposes, and some jurisdictions permit or require a name change to be recorded at marriage. The legal name may need to be used on various government issued documents (e.g., a court order). The term is also used when an individual changes their name, typically after reaching a certain legal age (usually eighteen or over, though it can be as low as fourteen in several European nations). A person's legal name typically is the same as their personal name, comprising a given name and a surname. The order varies according to culture and country. There are also country-by-country differences on changes of legal names by marriage. (See married name.) Most countries require by law the registration of a name for newborn children, and some can refuse registration of "undesirable" names.

Word play or wordplay (also: play-on-words) is a literary technique and a form of wit in which words used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement. Examples of word play include puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, double entendres, and telling character names (such as in the play The Importance of Being Earnest, Ernest being a given name that sounds exactly like the adjective earnest).

Word play is quite common in oral cultures as a method of reinforcing meaning. Examples of text-based (orthographic) word play are found in languages with or without alphabet-based scripts, such as homophonic puns in Mandarin Chinese.

The birth name is the name of the person given upon their birth. The term may be applied to the surname, the given name or to the entire name. Where births are required to be officially registered, the entire name entered onto a births register or birth certificate may by that fact alone become the person's legal name.

Over the course of some fourteen centuries, the Romans and other peoples of Italy employed a system of nomenclature that differed from that used by other cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, consisting of a combination of personal and family names. Although conventionally referred to as the tria nomina, the combination of praenomen, nomen, and cognomen that have come to be regarded as the basic elements of the Roman name in fact represent a continuous process of development, from at least the seventh century BC to the end of the seventh century AD. The names that developed as part of this system became a defining characteristic of Roman civilization, and although the system itself vanished during the Early Middle Ages, the names themselves exerted a profound influence on the development of European naming practices, and many continue to survive in modern languages.

A personal name, full name or prosoponym (from Ancient Greek prósōpon – person, and onoma –name) is the set of names by which an individual person or animal is known. When taken together as a phrase, they all relate to that one individual. In many cultures, the term is synonymous with the birth name or legal name of the individual. In linguistic classification, personal names are studied within a specific onomastic discipline, called anthroponymy.

In Western culture, nearly all individuals possess at least one given name (also known as a first name, forename, or Christian name), together with a surname (also known as a last name or family name). In the name "James Smith", for example, James is the first name and Smith is the surname. Surnames in the West generally indicate that the individual belongs to a family, a tribe, or a clan, although the exact relationships vary: they may be given at birth, taken upon adoption, changed upon marriage, and so on. Where there are two or more given names, typically only one (in English-speaking cultures usually the first) is used in normal speech.

Guan Zhong (Chinese: 管仲; Wade–Giles: Kuan Chung; c. 720–645 BC) was a Chinese philosopher and politician. He served as chancellor and was a reformer of the State of Qi during the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history. His given name was Yiwu (Chinese: 夷吾; pinyin: Yíwú). Zhong was his courtesy name. He is mainly remembered for his reforms as chancellor under Duke Huan of Qi, as well as his friendship with his colleague Bao Shuya, though his reputation remained controversial among the Confucians, as detailed in the appraisal section.

Through Guan Zhong's reforms and skilful diplomacy Qi became the most powerful of the feudal states and Duke Huan became the first of the Five Hegemons. Though knowledge of his reforms is limited, in particular he instituted a famous fiscal policy known as "balancing the light and the heavy", associated with salt and iron monopolies. Otherwise a diverse work, the Guanzi compilation making use of his name makes similar such recommendations.

Chinese names are personal names used by individuals from Greater China and other parts of the Sinophone world. Sometimes the same set of Chinese characters could be chosen as a Chinese name, a Hong Kong name, a Japanese name, a Korean name, a Han Taiwanese name, a Malaysian Chinese name, or a Vietnamese name, but they would be spelled differently due to their varying historical pronunciation of Chinese characters.

Modern Chinese names generally have a one-character surname (姓氏; xìngshì) that comes first, followed by a given name (名; míng) which may be either one or two characters in length. In recent decades, two-character given names are much more commonly chosen; studies during the 2000s and 2010s estimated that over three-quarters of China's population at the time had two-character given names, with the remainder almost exclusively having one character.

In many societies, a surname, last family name, or first family name is the mostly hereditary portion of one's personal name that indicates one's family. It is typically combined with a given name to form the full name of a person, although several given names and surnames are possible in the full name. In modern times most surnames are hereditary, although in most countries a person has a right to change their name.

Depending on culture, the surname may be placed either at the start of a person's name, or at the end. The number of surnames given to an individual also varies: in most cases it is just one, but in Portuguese-speaking countries and many Spanish-speaking countries, two surnames (one inherited from the mother and another from the father) are used for legal purposes. Depending on culture, not all members of a family unit are required to have identical surnames. In some countries, surnames are modified depending on gender and family membership status of a person. Compound surnames can be composed of separate names.

The T–V distinction is the contextual use of different pronouns that exists in some languages and serves to convey formality or familiarity. Its name comes from the Latin pronouns tu and vos. The distinction takes a number of forms and indicates varying levels of politeness, familiarity, courtesy, age or even insult toward the addressee. The field that studies and describes this phenomenon is sociolinguistics.

Many languages lack this type of distinction, instead relying on other morphological or discourse features to convey formality. English historically contained the distinction, using the pronouns thou and you, but the familiar thou largely disappeared from the era of Early Modern English onward, with the exception of a few dialects. Additionally, British commoners historically spoke to nobility and royalty using the third person rather than the second person, a practice that has fallen out of favour. English speakers today often employ semantic analogues to convey the mentioned attitudes towards the addressee, such as whether to address someone by given name or surname or whether to use sir or madam. Under a broader classification, T and V forms are examples of honorifics.