Why do we have middle names? When so many people hate theirs or simply don’t have one, it seems an unnecessary hassle for our culture in this day and age. But the longstanding tradition of middle names isn’t going away any time soon; where did it come from?
In Ancient Rome, your name could distinguish you between a high or low class citizen. The Roman naming system at the time consisted of a praenomen, a personal name (more or less the equivalent of a first name today), a nomen, a family name (which served the same purpose last names do today), and a cognomen, a sort of nickname attributing you to a certain branch of the family.
In Rome, the more of these names you had, the higher social stature you held. For example, a slave would only be known by their praenomen, while an aristocrat would likely have multiple praenomen or cognomen.
The Ancient Roman naming system faded with the Romans, and for a few centuries, most people in medieval Europe were only known by their first names. Then, likely in late-13th-century Italy, middle names started to make an appearance again.
It started amongst the more elite classes, as it likely would in any country or culture, and slowly trickled down to the more common folk. It took until the 1600s for middle names to be common for everyone. The rise of Catholicism in Europe also drove the middle name fad. People gave their children a personal first name and a second name that was the name of a Catholic saint, with the idea that this saint would protect the child throughout life. This practice gradually shifted into the common way we use middle names today-- that is, as a second “personal” name.
In other cultures today, middle names work differently. For example, many Slavic cultures have a patronymic naming system, where the child’s middle name is derived from the father’s first name. This is similar to the Ancient Roman cognomen. A traditional Chinese name includes a one-character surname and a two-character personal name. The first character of the personal name indicates a person’s generation within a family; for example a sister and a brother share the first character of their personal names.
Now you know!
Sources:
Reader’s Digest- https://www.rd.com/article/why-do-we-have-middle-names/#
Time Magazine- https://time.com/4451977/history-of-middle-names/
Wikipedia- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_name