I mean… lets just say my name is John Smith and I want to chaneg it to just: John
Is this legal/possible? I know you can change your name… but, to just only a FIRST name?
Hmmm? Hmmm? Hmmm?
Thanks!
I don’t know the law, but here in the US I did have a patient from the south pacific who went by only one name, Kenakone, or Kenakahone, if I remember correctly. Played hell with medical records, and lab ordering, but we accomodated him.
Some of the names I found in the Social Security Death Index:
M NLN (1908-1991)
NONE TURNER (1879-1966)
NONE O’CONNOR (1894-1966)
NONE TAYLOR (1905-1984)
NONE BLUEBIRD (1900-1981)
NFN KULWANTI (1930-2001)
NFN RAJPOUL (1921-2001)
D O (1954-1988)
S H O (1967-2000)
M S O (1956-1992)
Y O (1911-1992)
N T O (1953-1991)
More from the Social Security Death Index:
KRISTINA NO SURNAME (1971-1998)
Excellent… my primary reason is to defeat record keeping agencies… since most will delete a partial name entry…
hee hee
From the Penn and Teller website (www.pennandteller.com) FAQ section:
What is Teller’s real name?
Teller’s full legal name is just Teller. He has one of the few US passports that has been issued with a single name.
I remember recently there was an immigrant from an Asian country whose last name was simply “O”. The newspaper story said that he was forced to change his last name to “Oh” because the DMV could not issue a license for an “intial”. Sorry that there is a serious lack of supporting documentation for this story… you try doing a google search for “last name o” !
Did you put in “last name o” or last name +o" Google ignores single letters unless they have a plus sign in front of them.
A young Asian-American man with the same last name “O” problem was profiled in People magazine a few years ago. Their photo had him posing inside a giant tire, a cute visual joke.
A student at my school:
Note: User id’s are usually first 5 letters of last name, first letter of first name. So John Jacob Jingleheimer-Schmidt would be Jinglj.
This guy is merely chann.
Seems pretty cool to me.
Prince, Edge, Madonna, Bono, Sting… I would imagine some of the many musical folx (sorry, I’m not up on my rap) have actually changed their legal name. Prince in particular, AFAIK, really did legally change his name to that heiroglyphic.
I had a friend in college who had her name legally changed to Tashina. When she went to the Registrar to change her name for her official school records she told them that her first name was Tashina and that she didn’t have a last name. When informed that she had to have a last name she said that Tashina could just as well be her last name and she didn’t have a first name. She was officially listed as NFN Tashina.
Haj
Madonna, no. Sting, no. Prince, yes he was a hieroglyph for a while, but he’s back with Prince Rogers Nelson, legally. The Edge, no.
One easy way to tell is to check out the copyright registrations for their songs, in the U.S. Copyright Office online databases.
Purely anecdotal, but true:
At SUNY-Potsdam there was a student named Harold Brown, he went by “Hal”. He was there about 1986-1988, may have graduated '87 or '88 but I’m not sure.
Hal was quite a character, artistic, and a little flashy. In fact, Hal only went by his first name, to the point he decided to legally change it to HAL.
I professed disbelief, so he showed me his NY drivers license. I saw it with my own two eyes. It said “HAL”.
To change your name legally in most U.S. states, you have to plead in court. It’s usually not a difficult process, but you do have to go before a judge and give a reason.
You won’t be allowed to change your name legally if your purpose is fraudulent. I would think that most judges would consider that a “primary reason is to defeat record keeping agencies” would be fraudulent and wouldn’t let you go through with the change.
Other than that, you have to refer to the law of a specific state, although I doubt that any state would have a law explicitly requiring you to have two names.
In the 1985 documentary “Bring on the Night,” Sting rebukes a reporter for addressing him as “Gordon,” and says that he uses that name only on his legal documents. So, as of the mid-1980s, at least, Sting’s real name was still Gordon Matthew Sumner.
I am almost positive that there is no way Prince Rogers Nelson could have legally changed his name in the United States to that stupid symbol thingy.
As far as I know, Madonna’s legal name is still Madonna Ciccone.
Madonna’s real name is “goddess”. 
I thought goddesses were supposed to be attractive.
I teach ESL to adults.
There is a group of Vietnamese called the Montagnards. There are many different groups and a bunch of mutually unintelligible languages. Each group has different name rules.
Some of them have no last name, some just single letters. I had a student last semester named Niuh K. I have also had students named Kser Kser and Nem Nem. One assumes with those last two that they had no last name and just doubled their first names to make the immigration people happy.
RK
There was a candidate for school board in my town who loved to tell the story of how she got her last name. She was originally fro Inner Mongolia (the part of China bordering Mongolia) and her ethnic group there didn’t have last names. She came to America in 1980 and got married and in 1985 she gave birth to the daughter. Until then she hadn’t taken her husband’s name, but apparentlly she decided on the birth records she’d finally take his last name. She still had no idea about education, though, so she wasn’t elected.
acsenray,
Why would not wanting people to take my name and put it in their databse be fraudulant? I do not see the logical connection here. The purpose would not to be to avoid any debts, avoid any crimes, or anything illegal or fraudulant of any sorts. Just to keep my name off of some telephone solicitor’s database or DMA (Direct Marketing Agency). If anything, its insuring my privacy from these people.
And, yes, I would be willing to go this far to not be on a DMA database. And have them sell MY information willy-nilly.