Since I was a child my family always called me by my middle name, and that’s what I’ve used most of my life. Recently I’ve become used to being addressed by my first name from bartenders et al reading my credit card. From talking to other people, it seems almost everyone goes by their first name rather than middle one. Is this common? I wondered why if my family wanted me to go by my middle name, why didn’t they make it the first name?
I think the default, certainly in most Western cultures, is for your first name to be the one you use. But sometimes family tradition means your first name might be a traditional family or religious name, eg in my family, first sons used to always be named William so there’s a lot of Williams in the family tree. Your middle name might actually, at least according to your close family, be more individual to you.
I go by my first name in everyday life but I use my first initial and middle name (with various “misspellings”) when signing up for mailings and online services so I can track how my personal data gets re-sold.
We named both our kids with relatively simple and common first names, and slightly more interesting middle names (conventional, just less common), and have repeatedly told them they’re free to use first or middle, or any abbreviation or variation therefrom, as they prefer. So far they haven’t bitten, but they seem to appreciate being given the choice.
Nickname of my middle name, mostly.
A few know my first name. Other than family.
It’s an awful name.
Yes normally, but all the guys on my team at work have called me by my surname for as long as I can remember. I have no idea how or why it started and no-one else does it.
An old friend uses a diminutive of his middle name. So, “John Richard Smith” is simply, “Rick.” (Note that “Smith” is fictional.)
A local friend uses his last name. It’s a simple, one-syllable normal everyday word, while his first name is a little weird.
Me, I use a diminutive of my given name normally. But “Spoons” is my nickname in real life also, so I’ll answer to both.
The OP’s case is unusual in US usage, but not rare. The usual cause being something along the lines @SanVito says.
That is, the parents “forced” by family pressure to use a first name they wouldn’t have chosen, so they select a middle name they prefer and then use that for all daily purposes. As the kid growing up, you’re not going to know the rest of your name until about the time you’re starting to read and going to school. A LOT of unrelated nicknames have their origin there too. Or in Mom & Dad can’t agree on what to name the kid.
Over the years I’ve worked with lots of personnel rosters. Where I knew, either directly or indirectly a lot of the people on those rosters. So a sample size in the low number of thousands.
Of the people (kids or adults) where I’ve known for sure their full legal name and their personal daily-use moniker, maybe 2% of them use their middle name as their moniker. How many people who’s full legal name I don’t know are using their middle as their moniker? Beats heck outta me. But it’s probably not to far from the sample value I do have.
All bets are off if we’re not talking about ordinary USA-type fully assimilated cultures.
Unless you’re naughty and get yelled at a lot. “Steven Franklin McGillicuddy, you put down that chainsaw right now!”
My great-grandfather gave his son the same first name, “John” and to avoid confusion, my grandfather went by his middle name.
In turn, grandfather gave his son the same first name, and my uncle went by his middle name as well.
My uncle gave his first son the same first name, and finally my cousin went by his first name. So, four generations of “John.”
Apparently my cousin’s wife wasn’t as thrilled by old traditions so they gave their boys completely different names.
I go by a nickname based on a version of my name in a foreign language.
My parents didn’t give any of the 5 of us middle names. No clue why, since Mom has a middle name, tho Dad didn’t. Anyway, that made the decision easy.
My first name is incredibly common and shared by another close friend of mine, so my friends started referring to me mostly by my last name alone or occasionally my initials. Over time this has become what most people know me as, and I’ve come to prefer it.
At work I’m almost universally Dr. Lastname. It’s really just my wife and my parents who still use my first name.
I’ve had similar experiences (years of substitute teaching, where on taking attendance a kid says “I go by <completely different name>”. Yeah, about once for every two classes of 25 students each sounds about right.
When I was in grad school, one of my classmates had the first name “James”. But he was tired of always being “Which James?”, and so he decided, grad school, new life, nobody here knows him, so he’d go by his middle name, instead. And of course, it turned out that there weren’t any other "James"es in the department, but there was someone else with his (much less common) middle name.
It doesn’t have to be “forced” - it might be a matter of a family tradition that they want to follow and when you have six “Joseph” s all around the same age , you find ways to distinguish them. On one side of my family, the oldest boy was not named after the father - the oldest boy was named after the paternal grandfather. The second after the maternal grandfather. The third son might have been a “Jr”. So a man named “Joseph” might have six grandchildren named “Joseph”. One goes by “Joseph” one by “Joey” , one by “Pepe” and eventually you run out of related names and one or more go by their middle names or combo names like a cousin I have who is always “John Anthony”.
There are also the people who go by a combo of first and middle for other reasons. It’s usually women but there is occasionally a man who goes by something like “Billy Joe”.
I have a friend who is the third of his name: Jonathan Richard Smith III (not his name). I always knew him as Johnny but his family calls him Rich. Because Johnny was his father’s name.
He has a son, Jonathan Richard Smith IV. They call him Q.
I have heard of a couple of cases where a young child struggled with pronouncing their first name, so the family switched to the middle name.
In fiction we have the glorious Jack no-middle-name Reacher, who is always called Reacher (even by his family and friends.)
A friend of mine goes informally by his middle name, but signs his name and is known professionally by first initial, middle name and last name. I’ve known him for close to 50 years and have no idea what his first name is.
My middle name, and that of my brothers, is my mother’s family’s surname. Today my name might be hyphenated. My first name is one of the most overused, boring, common names in existence and I’ve never liked it. As a kid I always wished I could have had an ordinary middle name so I could have gone by that instead. My older brothers have rather unique names for the time they were born but when it came to me, my parents ran out of ideas and let my brothers give me a name, but they were just kids and unfortunately didn’t have much imagination, so I got what I got.
I go by my middle name, and both my parents did as well. Both names are common, or at least were at the time.
My sisters and I were given the same middle name. My bros hd their own middle names. We all go by our first names but shortened more or less.
My father’s first and middle name were taken from the last names of rich relatives, presumably in the hope that at some point money would be forthcoming from one or both of them (that didn’t happen). He hated his first name and went by his middle name. As an adult, he legally changed his name to drop the first name completely.
When I was in grade school I didn’t like my first name and tried to unilaterally change my name at school to a casual version of my middle name. My teacher said “no.”
Oh, yes, I just remembered: my first serious boyfriend went, at different times in his life, by either his first name or his middle name. His parents called him by his middle name, and even named the bar they owned after his middle name. I knew him by his middle name, but after we broke up he apparently went back to using his first name. Weird.