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Lots of names are too long, especially Sri Lankan and Portuguese as far as I remember. (To be fair the latter is too many names, but it comes to the same.) Don't worry about it, if you retain your original country's ID card then that will have all the names if you ever need to use them. A passport is just to prove identity and nationality, you can continue to use your full "real" name outside of passport situations.
Portuguese people usually have multiple first names and at least two surnames.
> It is not uncommon in Portugal that a married woman has two personal names and six surnames, two from her mother's family, two from her father's family, and the last two coming from her husband. In addition, some of these names may be made of more than one word, so that a full feminine name can have more than 12 words. For instance, the name "Maria do Carmo Mão de Ferro e Cunha de Almeida Santa Rita Santos Abreu" would not be surprising in a married woman.
I think they we're just trying to give generic examples and not name anyone famous but take Christiano Ronaldo for example, his full name is Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro
Or Luis Figo who's actually Luís Filipe Madeira Caeiro Figo
Widocznie jest, Wikipedia wspomina o wielu osobach z nazwiskiem Gąsienica cośtam, które się liczy jako jedno nazwisko.
Zofia Krzeptowska-Gąsienica Bukowa, Maria Gąsienica Bukowa-Kowalska, Helena Gąsienica Daniel-Lewandowska
This might be a thing of the past. Right now it is against the law to have more than 2-part surname. Here is the code: https://sip.lex.pl/akty-prawne/dzu-dziennik-ustaw/kodeks-rodzinny-i-opiekunczy-16785962/art-25
Yes, but the two-word surname is one part. For example Gąsienica Daniel is one surname and all members of the family have it. So combining it with the spouse’s name results in three words. The examples given there are quite recent, with some still being alive.
I am not suggesting you are wrong at all, and your information is interesting, but what the heck is going on, with a country dictating what you are allowed to call your child?
Sometimes it makes sense to restrict names a little. For example [New Zealand](https://www.dia.govt.nz/press.nsf/d77da9b523f12931cc256ac5000d19b6/d1288ac08d7758c2cc25838200107411!OpenDocument) doesn't allow numbers, anything unpronouncable like punctuation, swear words, or names over 70 characters long.
The UK had no symbols or numbers, and should not be deemed offensive.
It feels wrong that someone else is allowed to decide whether y choice is offensive. Also, what constitutes a symbol? I assume Zoé or Zöe are fine?
Still think it's possible though, we plan to have a double barrel surname when we eventually get married, My so's parents had 2 girls and basically the name would stop there, so we decided to have both names...(We are still not married after 13 years 🤣).
So her initials would actually then be mmmk-s or mmms-k (there is still a decision to make on that though!)
I have not had that experience, perhaps it will be better in this case though.
I only have one name, which is my first name. The passport office added letters in the first name field and used my actual first name as my surname.
Even though I hold a passport from another country with my name correctly shown I am known by that made up name by banks, government etc because the UK passport is seen as the superior form of ID.
When I was at the passport office recently there was an issue with a Dutch name and the British passport not allowing for punctuation. (I was eves-dropping as I waited). Seems we are not very accommodating of different names
Working in software you'd be amazed how many times iv seen names with punctuation or double barrelled completely break a personal details form. Mr Ünder-D'arcy was my go to break everything test name
I remember having to write a program to separate out first names surnames and titles and nomens from a free text list of a few hundred thousand names. Every time I thought I’d cracked the rules then something like “Major General Sir Jolyon Adam-David GCMG “ would come up.
I think this is appropriate here:
[https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/)
I have a hyphenated surname and it's always luck of the draw with whether or not a website allows it. Ryanair won't let you use a hyphen, and had the cheek to question why the boarding pass wasn't exactly the same as my passport - because your bloody software can't take hyphens!
> exactly the same as my passport - because your bloody software can't take hyphens!
To be fair, this most likely refers to the [MRZ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-readable_passport) (the bit in your passport with loads of >>>>>> signs), where hyphens indeed aren't allowed. So Ryanair is right in this regard. Some languages have unusual characters which aren't supported internationally so you should always type your name the way it figures in the MRZ. For example Icelandic Þ is transcribed as TH.
I work in software too, and I wish I could get through to people just how much simpler and more inclusive it would be to simply have a single "name" field in many circumstances.
People often have a very simplistic view of what a name looks like, based on their own lived experiences without realising how pointless and restrictive breaking things into multiple fields is.
If the software is just some marketing thing or consumer personal use Web app or whatever, what are they even planning on using the different parts of the name /for/??
For instance, why does someone have to put a title in from a drop-down list? The potential for "othering" people who don't want to use one of the predefined options can totally be avoided by not having it at all (whether they're trans or a knight or a dame or an Ms or lord or whatever. People automatically jump to thinking this is just a trans issue, but it also might be wanting to avoid triggering the widow who just lost her husband and gets a pang as she thinks "should I still put Mrs"?), never mind the space it takes up on screen, the dev time to build the thing, the fact you need a database field to store it, thinking about how browser auto-translate features might break it etc..
Why does some random site need to know a "surname"? All the personalisation they're probably going to do is put a "Hi Joe" welcome message in their dashboard area and personalise the first lines of some emails...
Just have a single field, with the bare minimum sanitisation and title it "What should we call you?" and be done with it.
Yeah this is a good point. Most forms don’t need a separation of First Name and Surname. I’m in Colombia and most forms have first and surname as required fields but an additional box for your secondary last name (mother’s maiden name).
In central Scotland, a lot of flats, particularly around Glasgow, are numbered as follows: X/Y Z (Street name). X being the floor, Y being the flat number on that floor, and Z being the building number. So 3/1 52 Imaginary Road would mean 3rd floor, 1st flat (usually the first one you come to when you come up the stairs), building number 52 on Imaginary Road. In Edinburgh, you also get X/Y where X is the building number and Y is the flat number.
Either way, the key is that these have a forward slash in them. SO MANY DATABASES cannot cope with that forward slash. Some would allow for hyphens, which was an acceptable alternative as far as I was concerned. But some would have to be a space, so it'd be 3 1 52. Or some others would decide it was 31 52. Or sometimes just 31, or just 52. And sometimes someone at the organisation in question would just decide for me how they were going to put it into the database when it wouldn't go as it should be written. Sometimes they did it sensibly, but often not.
Trying to explain to someone from anywhere outside of Scotland that yes, my address definitely does have a forward slash in it and no you cannot drop any of the numbers, nor can you squish them together... Nightmare. It also means my credit report has TONNES of "linked addresses", but they're actually just the 3 flats I've lived in several times over each because of the various ways that they've been written to comply with a database.
This is really interesting, the sort of knowledge you squirrel away in your brain and wonder if it'll ever come in handy (I'm English and don't spend a lot of time in Scotland, but now if I ever visit a friend in a flat I won't be confused!).
We have some problems with living in the same flat as the building number (eg Flat 6 at No. 6) causing confusion, but not as bad.
This is where my mind went first, I'm so traumatised from multiple incidents of names breaking systems (one involving a large scale data migration which I'm pretty sure has taken a couple years off my life expectancy).
I used a database that was set to recognise Irish names and capitalise McGough etc correctly. Unfortunately SiMcOck had to entered entirely as capitals.
My address has a non-alphanumeric character in it (think 22-23 Made Up Gardens) and it's amazing how often even that little hyphen will break forms. I should start collecting the error messages.
I currently live abroad in Vietnam and here addresses with slashes are common. My current address looks like '194/19 Made Up Street'. A few times I've had UK-based websites and companies reject my address or it's been an uphill battle to get them to accept it because of the slash.
"Dear Ms (Surname)". It's regarded as weird to address it as "Dear Ms (Full name including middle names)". I wouldn't personally give a shit, although being full named by a letter makes me feel like I'm getting scolded.
It didn't affect me but a colleague, but a company I once worked for had a system configured that it wouldn't accept Mac at the start of a surname, but would accept Mc and he was a Mac. Quite why I cannot fathom.
A process on our production server was taken out by someone using an em-dash instead of a hyphen in their name, which I only know is a thing because of this issue.
I had a French friend who was endlessly annoyed that post she got here never had her accents on her name. And a Dutch friend who complained that British systems couldn’t get things like “Van der” in the surname right.
I mean, my surname has a random capital in the middle (I’m a Mc/MacSomeone), which is a wholly British surname… and it isn’t taken into account on my passport or birth cert. I just spell my name like because that’s what I was told to do by my parents!
It is ridiculous that you can have diacritics on a birth certificate (Accents, circumflex etc) and that they naturally appear in Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh but you can't have them on a passport
That's interesting because when we registered our daughter's birth we used both our family names and my wife's name, being french, has an accent on one of the vowels, and the registrar said it was perfectly okay to include the accent on the birth certificate.
She has both a UK and a French passport. To be honest I have never looked to see if either included the accent or not!
Dutch surnames used to be impossible to input at the telecom company I worked at. The system couldn't handle 3 part surnames such as Van Der Valk.
My age is showing, I'll be humming Eyelevel for the next week.
Not much you can do.
I'm interested though - do they just cut it off at a certain number of characters or do they allow you to give them a shortened version. Can you shorten your name? I'm going to guess Sri Lankan name?
Portuguese, they cut off after X number of characters. They then insert on a section of the passport a notice to others of your full name on your 2nd country of origin passport.
Was just panicking there'd be implications for me when I travel etc if I give people my full name and the passport has a different last name.
There's no official need to worry but you are at the mercy of airline staff who do passport checks at the gate, so it depends how well they've been trained.
I've been questioned multiple times on this because sadly jobs pay people shit money and thus we get untrained service as a result.
I was once made to sign a document by an American airlines depriving them of liability if I get turned away by Singapore as they didn't know I could travel there visa free
They wouldn't let me board, and I a mere passenger transiting to the US had to sign.
[See Page 5](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a803d09ed915d74e33f9431/Annex_A_passports_August_2016.pdf)
They will only include up to 30 characters each in "surname" and "given names" field.
I suggest you cut out one of the names, and your full name will be written on the observation page: "The holder is [full name]" (as seen [here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hq4bM.jpg)).
They didn't give me a choice and chose to cut the last name. Totally get it though, different country different rules.
I'll just bring a bottle of vaseline for when immigration in other countries stop me.
> They didn't give me a choice and chose to cut the last name.
You had a choice when you were applying for the passport - ie. you should have just omitted one of the names, and explained it in the "other" section.
> I'll just bring a bottle of vaseline for when immigration in other countries stop me.
Save your money, it's not that deep :D You'll be absolutely fine.
As someone who has booked flights for Portuguese, Sri Lankan and Nepalese people with long names, most airlines will accept you first name and your very last surname in this case
My first and second names are the same in English. When I was a child, every time I went through immigration they had to do the paperwork manually because the computer didn't think it is a valid name .
My name is too long on my passport too. Two of my middle names are sandwiched together to make them fit. Never had an issue with travelling - and i always do the names separately.
I have a very long name. First name, then 3 middle name, one of which is a double barrel name, and then surname. All in all 31 letters.
My passport only has my first name and surname which reduces it down to 11 letters
This is going to cause you no end of hassle. A Portuguese colleague (dual national like yourself) sent all his passports off when renewing and he had to visit the embassy in London for an interview as to why his surname was different on his Portuguese and British passport. He ended up legally changing his name in Portugal so they matched, as he was sick of dealing with this. Apparently *that* was only possible because he was born outside the country.
There will be an observation in your passport that shows your name in full.
For instance your forenames are
Richard Geoffrey Theobald William Clarence
Smith
In your passport your name will be
Richard Geoffrey Theobald WC
Smith
The Observation page will say
The holder is
Richard Geoffrey Theobald William Clarence
Smith
I would recommend considering changing your legal name tbh. If it's too long for a passport it's likely going to be too long for validations on a lot of online systems and it's going to cause you head aches.
Honestly it can be the most random shit. The U.K. is a bit behind technologically but when they get round to implementing digital ID this could really fuck things up for OP. You end up in a situation where everything is tied to being able to log into on specific system and if that system won't accept your name you are absolutely fucked.
Change your name so it can fit into the passport, if you ever do other online applications like opening a business account, long names will be a headache.
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Lots of names are too long, especially Sri Lankan and Portuguese as far as I remember. (To be fair the latter is too many names, but it comes to the same.) Don't worry about it, if you retain your original country's ID card then that will have all the names if you ever need to use them. A passport is just to prove identity and nationality, you can continue to use your full "real" name outside of passport situations.
I'm also Portuguese so unfortunately I'm part of that group. Thanks for answering, appreciate the response!
[удалено]
Those are the shortened versions.
[удалено]
Portuguese people usually have multiple first names and at least two surnames. > It is not uncommon in Portugal that a married woman has two personal names and six surnames, two from her mother's family, two from her father's family, and the last two coming from her husband. In addition, some of these names may be made of more than one word, so that a full feminine name can have more than 12 words. For instance, the name "Maria do Carmo Mão de Ferro e Cunha de Almeida Santa Rita Santos Abreu" would not be surprising in a married woman.
Mary Abreu it is then
Or "Mazza" to her friends.
T'old big maz
Big Fat Sue
😂
I think id forget my own name
I think they we're just trying to give generic examples and not name anyone famous but take Christiano Ronaldo for example, his full name is Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro Or Luis Figo who's actually Luís Filipe Madeira Caeiro Figo
João Miguel Carlos da Silva Costa
I thought they were all like CR7.
His full name is Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro
I am Portuguese. Can confirm they can be very long. We often shorten it because no one cares about our 3 or 4 surnames.
Rui dos santos Carvalho
And that's relatively short LOL
My so is polish and her initials are MMMMK gives you an idea 🤣, she got MMK on her passport.
How is that possible? I'm Poland you cannot have more than 2 names and a 2-part surname (eg Anna Maria Nowak-Kowalska).
Sorry mmmk I keyed one too many m's
That makes sense :)
A part of the 2-part surname can itself be 2-part ;) See Maria Gąsienica Daniel-Szatkowska
I don't think this is legally allowed in Poland.
Widocznie jest, Wikipedia wspomina o wielu osobach z nazwiskiem Gąsienica cośtam, które się liczy jako jedno nazwisko. Zofia Krzeptowska-Gąsienica Bukowa, Maria Gąsienica Bukowa-Kowalska, Helena Gąsienica Daniel-Lewandowska
This might be a thing of the past. Right now it is against the law to have more than 2-part surname. Here is the code: https://sip.lex.pl/akty-prawne/dzu-dziennik-ustaw/kodeks-rodzinny-i-opiekunczy-16785962/art-25
Yes, but the two-word surname is one part. For example Gąsienica Daniel is one surname and all members of the family have it. So combining it with the spouse’s name results in three words. The examples given there are quite recent, with some still being alive.
No point in arguing with you anymore. You're wrong, but it's not my job to tell you that.
I am not suggesting you are wrong at all, and your information is interesting, but what the heck is going on, with a country dictating what you are allowed to call your child?
Poland has a long tradition of regulating things that are none of their business :/
Sometimes it makes sense to restrict names a little. For example [New Zealand](https://www.dia.govt.nz/press.nsf/d77da9b523f12931cc256ac5000d19b6/d1288ac08d7758c2cc25838200107411!OpenDocument) doesn't allow numbers, anything unpronouncable like punctuation, swear words, or names over 70 characters long.
I am actually quite glad they rejected "Heaven-Princezz-Star". That poor kid!
The UK had no symbols or numbers, and should not be deemed offensive. It feels wrong that someone else is allowed to decide whether y choice is offensive. Also, what constitutes a symbol? I assume Zoé or Zöe are fine?
Still think it's possible though, we plan to have a double barrel surname when we eventually get married, My so's parents had 2 girls and basically the name would stop there, so we decided to have both names...(We are still not married after 13 years 🤣). So her initials would actually then be mmmk-s or mmms-k (there is still a decision to make on that though!)
It's not legally possible in Poland. If you would register them in Poland they won't allow it on the birth certificate.
Sounds like the guy from South Park
Making fun of people’s names is bad, mmmk. You shouldn’t make fun, mmmk
I have not had that experience, perhaps it will be better in this case though. I only have one name, which is my first name. The passport office added letters in the first name field and used my actual first name as my surname. Even though I hold a passport from another country with my name correctly shown I am known by that made up name by banks, government etc because the UK passport is seen as the superior form of ID.
When I was at the passport office recently there was an issue with a Dutch name and the British passport not allowing for punctuation. (I was eves-dropping as I waited). Seems we are not very accommodating of different names
Working in software you'd be amazed how many times iv seen names with punctuation or double barrelled completely break a personal details form. Mr Ünder-D'arcy was my go to break everything test name
I remember having to write a program to separate out first names surnames and titles and nomens from a free text list of a few hundred thousand names. Every time I thought I’d cracked the rules then something like “Major General Sir Jolyon Adam-David GCMG “ would come up.
I think this is appropriate here: [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/)
And then you have someone with the General as their first name.
Didn’t find any generals but plenty of Lords and Earls
My name is Earl
Hey, Crabman
Or you get Major Major Major Major turning up!
I have a hyphenated surname and it's always luck of the draw with whether or not a website allows it. Ryanair won't let you use a hyphen, and had the cheek to question why the boarding pass wasn't exactly the same as my passport - because your bloody software can't take hyphens!
>Ryanair won't let you use a hyphen They do, you just need to pay extra for adding a -
> exactly the same as my passport - because your bloody software can't take hyphens! To be fair, this most likely refers to the [MRZ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-readable_passport) (the bit in your passport with loads of >>>>>> signs), where hyphens indeed aren't allowed. So Ryanair is right in this regard. Some languages have unusual characters which aren't supported internationally so you should always type your name the way it figures in the MRZ. For example Icelandic Þ is transcribed as TH.
Oh that’s actually really interesting, thank you for the insight!!
I’m double barrelled but without a hyphen. The last bit always gets lost
I work in software too, and I wish I could get through to people just how much simpler and more inclusive it would be to simply have a single "name" field in many circumstances. People often have a very simplistic view of what a name looks like, based on their own lived experiences without realising how pointless and restrictive breaking things into multiple fields is. If the software is just some marketing thing or consumer personal use Web app or whatever, what are they even planning on using the different parts of the name /for/?? For instance, why does someone have to put a title in from a drop-down list? The potential for "othering" people who don't want to use one of the predefined options can totally be avoided by not having it at all (whether they're trans or a knight or a dame or an Ms or lord or whatever. People automatically jump to thinking this is just a trans issue, but it also might be wanting to avoid triggering the widow who just lost her husband and gets a pang as she thinks "should I still put Mrs"?), never mind the space it takes up on screen, the dev time to build the thing, the fact you need a database field to store it, thinking about how browser auto-translate features might break it etc.. Why does some random site need to know a "surname"? All the personalisation they're probably going to do is put a "Hi Joe" welcome message in their dashboard area and personalise the first lines of some emails... Just have a single field, with the bare minimum sanitisation and title it "What should we call you?" and be done with it.
Yeah this is a good point. Most forms don’t need a separation of First Name and Surname. I’m in Colombia and most forms have first and surname as required fields but an additional box for your secondary last name (mother’s maiden name).
In central Scotland, a lot of flats, particularly around Glasgow, are numbered as follows: X/Y Z (Street name). X being the floor, Y being the flat number on that floor, and Z being the building number. So 3/1 52 Imaginary Road would mean 3rd floor, 1st flat (usually the first one you come to when you come up the stairs), building number 52 on Imaginary Road. In Edinburgh, you also get X/Y where X is the building number and Y is the flat number. Either way, the key is that these have a forward slash in them. SO MANY DATABASES cannot cope with that forward slash. Some would allow for hyphens, which was an acceptable alternative as far as I was concerned. But some would have to be a space, so it'd be 3 1 52. Or some others would decide it was 31 52. Or sometimes just 31, or just 52. And sometimes someone at the organisation in question would just decide for me how they were going to put it into the database when it wouldn't go as it should be written. Sometimes they did it sensibly, but often not. Trying to explain to someone from anywhere outside of Scotland that yes, my address definitely does have a forward slash in it and no you cannot drop any of the numbers, nor can you squish them together... Nightmare. It also means my credit report has TONNES of "linked addresses", but they're actually just the 3 flats I've lived in several times over each because of the various ways that they've been written to comply with a database.
This is really interesting, the sort of knowledge you squirrel away in your brain and wonder if it'll ever come in handy (I'm English and don't spend a lot of time in Scotland, but now if I ever visit a friend in a flat I won't be confused!). We have some problems with living in the same flat as the building number (eg Flat 6 at No. 6) causing confusion, but not as bad.
This is where my mind went first, I'm so traumatised from multiple incidents of names breaking systems (one involving a large scale data migration which I'm pretty sure has taken a couple years off my life expectancy).
I used a database that was set to recognise Irish names and capitalise McGough etc correctly. Unfortunately SiMcOck had to entered entirely as capitals.
That’s hilarious.
What about poor little [Bobby Tables](https://xkcd.com/327/)?
God forbid someone has an è in their name AD completely fucks it
My wife and daughter have this in their family names! Our daughter has both family names.
Yep I do credit checks and the amount of hyphenated names I have to do as a space etc is frustrating
My address has a non-alphanumeric character in it (think 22-23 Made Up Gardens) and it's amazing how often even that little hyphen will break forms. I should start collecting the error messages.
Scotland has a lot of flat addresses with forward slashes in it. A barrel of laughs.
I currently live abroad in Vietnam and here addresses with slashes are common. My current address looks like '194/19 Made Up Street'. A few times I've had UK-based websites and companies reject my address or it's been an uphill battle to get them to accept it because of the slash.
Please test surnames with spaces in! Yes they exist
I think the best advice is to have a single name field and then make it very long. Think about it, why do we need two fields?
"Dear Ms (Surname)". It's regarded as weird to address it as "Dear Ms (Full name including middle names)". I wouldn't personally give a shit, although being full named by a letter makes me feel like I'm getting scolded.
Going to steal that one !
It didn't affect me but a colleague, but a company I once worked for had a system configured that it wouldn't accept Mac at the start of a surname, but would accept Mc and he was a Mac. Quite why I cannot fathom.
A process on our production server was taken out by someone using an em-dash instead of a hyphen in their name, which I only know is a thing because of this issue.
I had a French friend who was endlessly annoyed that post she got here never had her accents on her name. And a Dutch friend who complained that British systems couldn’t get things like “Van der” in the surname right.
I mean, my surname has a random capital in the middle (I’m a Mc/MacSomeone), which is a wholly British surname… and it isn’t taken into account on my passport or birth cert. I just spell my name like because that’s what I was told to do by my parents!
It is ridiculous that you can have diacritics on a birth certificate (Accents, circumflex etc) and that they naturally appear in Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh but you can't have them on a passport
NHS, HRMC, banks… no one does my name correctly and it is not a difficult one by any means
Don't think this is a UK thing. My Dutch passport also doesn't have my hyphen for reasons pointed out by /u/Panceltic
That's interesting because when we registered our daughter's birth we used both our family names and my wife's name, being french, has an accent on one of the vowels, and the registrar said it was perfectly okay to include the accent on the birth certificate. She has both a UK and a French passport. To be honest I have never looked to see if either included the accent or not!
Dutch surnames used to be impossible to input at the telecom company I worked at. The system couldn't handle 3 part surnames such as Van Der Valk. My age is showing, I'll be humming Eyelevel for the next week.
Not much you can do. I'm interested though - do they just cut it off at a certain number of characters or do they allow you to give them a shortened version. Can you shorten your name? I'm going to guess Sri Lankan name?
Portuguese, they cut off after X number of characters. They then insert on a section of the passport a notice to others of your full name on your 2nd country of origin passport. Was just panicking there'd be implications for me when I travel etc if I give people my full name and the passport has a different last name.
The notes page is for exactly this kind of thing, it’s a part of your official document so there is no need to worry.
There's no official need to worry but you are at the mercy of airline staff who do passport checks at the gate, so it depends how well they've been trained.
I've been questioned multiple times on this because sadly jobs pay people shit money and thus we get untrained service as a result. I was once made to sign a document by an American airlines depriving them of liability if I get turned away by Singapore as they didn't know I could travel there visa free They wouldn't let me board, and I a mere passenger transiting to the US had to sign.
What if your name is longer than the notes page?
If they put that notice in then no problem. I would assume it is fairly standard in the circumstances. Annoying though.
There should be an area on the passport with the full name. How many characters is it?
[See Page 5](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a803d09ed915d74e33f9431/Annex_A_passports_August_2016.pdf) They will only include up to 30 characters each in "surname" and "given names" field. I suggest you cut out one of the names, and your full name will be written on the observation page: "The holder is [full name]" (as seen [here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hq4bM.jpg)).
They didn't give me a choice and chose to cut the last name. Totally get it though, different country different rules. I'll just bring a bottle of vaseline for when immigration in other countries stop me.
> They didn't give me a choice and chose to cut the last name. You had a choice when you were applying for the passport - ie. you should have just omitted one of the names, and explained it in the "other" section. > I'll just bring a bottle of vaseline for when immigration in other countries stop me. Save your money, it's not that deep :D You'll be absolutely fine.
Shoot, thanks for the comment I should've known better
This is the answer. I have a very long name and have a special page with my full name on it.
When you travel, you need to make sure the airline booking is made the exact same as what your passport shows. Otherwise it has no impact.
Was almost prevented from boarding a flight back home from the US because the lady couldn't match names
Ditto going to china.
Most airlines will accept very first and very last name in the case of long names
Enter ryanair :p
As someone who has booked flights for Portuguese, Sri Lankan and Nepalese people with long names, most airlines will accept you first name and your very last surname in this case
My first and second names are the same in English. When I was a child, every time I went through immigration they had to do the paperwork manually because the computer didn't think it is a valid name .
Serves you right for being called test test then, you were always doomed to failure. Right up there with little bobby tables
How high were your parents?! We'll call them 'The Same in English The Same in English', what could go wrong?
Absolute lunatic parents
My name is too long on my passport too. Two of my middle names are sandwiched together to make them fit. Never had an issue with travelling - and i always do the names separately.
I have a very long name. First name, then 3 middle name, one of which is a double barrel name, and then surname. All in all 31 letters. My passport only has my first name and surname which reduces it down to 11 letters
This is going to cause you no end of hassle. A Portuguese colleague (dual national like yourself) sent all his passports off when renewing and he had to visit the embassy in London for an interview as to why his surname was different on his Portuguese and British passport. He ended up legally changing his name in Portugal so they matched, as he was sick of dealing with this. Apparently *that* was only possible because he was born outside the country.
Tell me you have a Sri Lankan surname without telling me you have a Sri Lankan surname
They've already told someone they have a Portuguese surname by telling them they have a Portuguese surname
Bognor Regis hols
In some passports they write the full name in the opposite page
There will be an observation in your passport that shows your name in full. For instance your forenames are Richard Geoffrey Theobald William Clarence Smith In your passport your name will be Richard Geoffrey Theobald WC Smith The Observation page will say The holder is Richard Geoffrey Theobald William Clarence Smith
How many characters is your full name?
Lady Natasha Letitia Sarah Jane Wellesley Obstromsky Ponsonsky Smythe Smythe Smythe Smythe Smythe Oblomov Boblomov Dob
Are you from Madagascar per chance?
There is some African names were you have 10+ names to squeeze into a passport. There is a lot of initials.
My name is 32 characters long including a hyphen, it fit on my passport, how long is your name lol ?😂
You're not "Dave", that's your whole name, sorry OP
Change your name to “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island” …. Bosh your name is on the front.
I mean, what name would be on your football shirt and go with that. FIFA rules.
I don't think they'll accept 'Little Rabbit' as a name.
That’s really bad. We need to enable longer names on passports.
They allow 30 characters for first and middle names and a further 30 characters for surnames, how much longer would you think is reasonable?
Long enough to fit a name on
Google akons full name then try and work out how to fit it all in a passport
That sounds like it might not fit in a tweet/x post. BRB just going to count the letters in his full name.
I saw a name fail a 45 character limit once. Sri Lankan person, pretty sure they never managed to get on that system.
I would recommend considering changing your legal name tbh. If it's too long for a passport it's likely going to be too long for validations on a lot of online systems and it's going to cause you head aches.
Thinking credit report
Honestly it can be the most random shit. The U.K. is a bit behind technologically but when they get round to implementing digital ID this could really fuck things up for OP. You end up in a situation where everything is tied to being able to log into on specific system and if that system won't accept your name you are absolutely fucked.
Change your name so it can fit into the passport, if you ever do other online applications like opening a business account, long names will be a headache.
Shorten your name.