Is there a purpose to having a middle name? What is the origin of this? Do many countries do it? In America are you allowed to not give your child a middle name?
It’s probably so we can “choose” to use it later on as an alternate name if we’re unhappy with our given first names.
Probably.
I know that’s not an answer. Just speculation. Not what you seek at a site like this. Oh well.
I have a couple of friends with no middle names.
I don’t know their purpose, other than to give the other kids something to make fun of you with.
A way to honor an ancestor? A way to seek favor with a supernatural entity of some sort (like if I wanted Saint Dismas or Dionysios to like my kid but didn’t want to inflict a first name like Dismas or Dionysios on him). A way to designate a child’s relation to other people? To allow a mother’s maiden name to continue in a society where the paternal name is the one passed on? To resolve situations where the dad wants the little on to be named Bob and the mom wants the little one to be named Tristan? Parental pretension?
Some cultures (I’m thinking of the Russians) have specific “formulas” for giving a child their name(s) and I’m sure somebody will be along to explain some of them before too long.
My kid’s got a middle name because everybody else has one. Also, thinking sort of like criminalcatalog, I thought it would be nice to give her a choice as to what she wanted to be called, especially since I gave her an unusual first name. Plus, the nurses said I had to. 
So that children will know when they’re really in trouble:
<Increasingly irate mother>
“Peter!”
“Peter Jones!”
“Peter Anthony Jones!”
Russians and, as far as I know, Greeks (and maybe others?) use patronymics as their middle names - basically an accepted variant of your father’s name. So if my name is Svetlana Pushkin, my brother’s Boris and my dad’s Ivan, my full name would be Svetlana Ivanova Pushkin and little bro’ is Boris Ivanov Pushkin.
Closer to home … the upper classes generally lead the way in naming schemes in European societies, and even today you’ll notice that princes/lords/earls and so on and so forth in Britain tend to have more than their fair share of middle names.
My guess would be that the trend started with kings and princes, and that the original motivation for this would be political - naming kids after people in their family tree is a way of linking them to their ancestry which would have important diplomatic ramifications in a monarchical system. Once the nobles started doing it, everyone else would follow suit because it was the ‘posh’ thing to do.
A bit like last names, in fact.
<applauds> Yup, except for one thing: your name would be Svetlana Ivanova Pushkina. My mother had a patronymic for a middle name, but since it was never used, she had to put “none” on her driver’s license.
I think middle names came about to distinguish one John Jones (or Ivan Ivanov) from all the others bearing that combination of given and family name.
Middle names are a hold-over from a primitive belief in magic, evil spirits, and curses.
Names–whether of an object or a person, were believed to have power to control or injure the person/object named. By having a secret name, unknownto strangers, a child could be spiritually protected.
If the secret name was that of a saint or other supernatural being, additional protection from evil forces.
The name of a dead relative provided the possibility that the spirit of the deceased might supernaturaly interviene on behalf of the person named.
Middle, or Christian, names are a holdover from these early beliefs.
Also, if the grandpa is rich, he may inherit all the dough. 
Often parents will give a child more than one name in order to honor more than one person (or sometimes, event) as their child’s namesake.
In Judaism, there is also a tradition that adding names to an existing name can effect a change of luck. For example, it is traditional to not name a child after someone who has died young, but it is acceptable to give a child that person’s name with another name added to it, as it is a “different” name, but still honors the memory of the person in question. (This is, in fact, what my wife and I did with our firstborn son.)
I have a middle name so that I can get out of parking tickets.
When I was in college, there was was another student with my same family and personal name. He got parking tickets. I was called to the school office and asked why I didn’t pay. I replied, “My middle name starts with R; check the full name of the accused.” Sure enough, his middle name started with L. I was released.
And besides, I didn’t even have a car.
Prior to the late 18th century, most Americans did not have middle names, and neither did most English subjects. It was considered a European custom, although of course many other peoples use middle names, especially patronymics.
I do wonder if middle names in Europe are related to the Catholic custom of confirmation names. Catholics (and maybe some other sects) confirm an infant’s baptism later in childhood/adolescence; at that time, a saint’s name is adopted and added to one’s own: Thus, my father’s name was Francis Xavier [lastnameznunnyabizness], but to the church he is Francis Xavier Owen [lastnamezstillnunnyabizness]. (The last person in our family to be confirmed was my brother, Michael Patrick Joseph [yeah, we’re Irish–how’djah guess?])
If others adopted the custom of having a second name, but assigned it at birth without practicing confirmation, and then catholics added a middle name at birth plus another name at confirmation – well, that would explain everything!
Without middle names, we wouldn’t have “George C. Scott” or “Arthur C. Clarke” or “F. Scott Fitzgerald” or “Joe Michael Straczynski” or “Jahn Wayne Bobbit” – and then where would we be?!
– tracer, who, without his middle name, would merely be “Roger Wilcox, over and out!”
My sister and I don’t have middle names, and neither does my mother. (My dad did.) Since I have never had one, I can tell you why I did give my son a middle name:
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I never forgot the frustrating argument I had with my first-grade teacher, the one where she was insisting that I tell her what my middle name was (since it wasn’t on the paperwork) and didn’t believe that I didn’t have one. “It doesn’t matter how much you hate it, just tell me!” “sob You can call my Mooooom!!!*sob”
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My financial aid checks were all made out to Theo F. Broma. The forms read: Last name…first name…middle initial…gender. So my middle name was “female.” The bank, luckily, honored the checks.
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Some of the early computer systems (maybe it was the early computer users) couldn’t handle a blank where middle name should be, so either I got a phantom middle initial (the problem in first grade) or an official middle name of “none”.
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I don’t have anything monogrammed. I don’t really need anything monogrammed, but it would be nice to be able to if I felt like it.
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My maiden name was not very common, but if it were, certainly the middle name would differentiate between Theo J. Broma and Theo Q. Broma. Although, if there are two Theo Marie Bromas, you’re out of luck.
…in short, most Americans have middle names because most other Americans have middle names. The computers expect it, the authority figures expect it, and it’s a hassle to explain why you don’t have one. If most Americans had five names, I would have given my son five names. Why cause a fuss over nothing?
Now, this does not invalidate all the reasons above. I just thought you might like the perspective of a Doper with 2/3 of a whole name.
-Theo (none) Broma
You think that’s bad? I have an Icelandic friend who is given endless grief in America because he has no surname.
There is ample evidence for this in American history. Only 3 presidents before 1869 had middle names. Only 3 after 1869 did not have a middle name (well 4 considering Truman only had a middle initial).
Quoth Bosda de Some Other Stuff:
You seem to be implying that middle names and Christian names are synonymous. A person’s Christian name is just the name that person was baptised with. There was a time (especially pre-Vatican II) when a priest would insist that a child be baptised with a saint’s name (or at least an Old Testament biblical name). Now, sometimes, parents who wanted to give their child a heathen name would put a Christian name in the middle for this purpose, but more often, the Christian name was just the first name. This has pretty much fallen by the wayside, now, and a child can be baptised with any name.
Now, confirmation names do still need to be saints’ names, but there, you’re choosing the particular saint, not just the name per se. For instance, my confirmation saint is specifically St. Francis of Assisi, not any of the assorted other St. Francises. I’ve only once seen a person’s confirmation name actually used as part of a person’s name, though, and that not even in any official religious context.
From Conspiracy Theory:
There are no middle names here (France), but children are most often given several names (usually between two and four). Basically, the names besides the first one are never used nor mentionned. They only appear on some official documents. On most documents, there’s no spot intended to write other names beside the first one. I’ve personnally no clue about the other names of relatives, friends or women I lived with except three of them (my mother, a niece, and a former girlfriend) and in each of these three cases there’s a reason why I know them.
Originally, they were given to honor some members of the family (and quite often the godfather/godmother). I never heard about “confirmation names” perhaps such a custom used to exist in the past…
There are some composed names, though. I mean two different names which are sometimes stuck together and used as only one name. It doesn’t work with all names, but only with some limited combinations of them. In particular, there are many combinations including the name “Jean”. Jean-Christophe, Jean-Paul, Jean-Pierre, Jean-Marie, etc… I assume that Jean used to be so common a name that there what some need to differentiate between people with identical first name and family name, which lead to these traditionnal composed names.
Some stuff on middle names I’ve picked up doing genealogy:
I recently starting researching a German branch where the habit was to name all sons with the same first name. The middle name was essential to provide a distinction. It was common to some parts of Germany and lasted 1-2 generations in America. (All pre-1800.)
On the Norwegian side, I’ve generally seen middle names arise in the early 1700’s among the more well to do, esp. for females. There were just too many "Anna Olsen"s around so “Anna Maria Olsen” was more distinctive. It isn’t until almost the mid-1800s that I see middle names become really common among everyday Norwegians. By that time, the names seem to be used to honor secondary relatives and important friends of the family.
But I have a sister with no middle name.
In Spain, as well as most Latin American countries, it is very customary to give children more than one name. For example, one of my uncles is called "Ramón José María del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, followed by his two last names.
Of course he only uses Ramón José regularly, but his baptismal record and his birth certificate state all of the above.
I think the names in this case are used as a means of recognition by the parents to saints or holy figures that they wish will protect the child.
Also, until recently, it was customary to at least add the name of the Saint celebrated on the date when the child was born. To those who don’t know what I’m talking about, every saint has a date on which the curch celebrates that saint’s life, and calendars include all the saints celebrated on said date. There are so many saints that you get more than one per day, so I think, at least in Spain, this could have been a factor.
By the way, I only have two first names…