Double-barrelled name
From Free net encyclopedia
In English-speaking and some other western countries, a double-barrelled name is a family name with two parts, which may or may not be joined with a hyphen, for example Bowes-Lyon or Fraser Darling. The term is an analogy with double-barrelled shotgun.
Double-barrelled names may be formed for a variety of reasons. Some are formed when a man's and woman's family names are combined upon marriage, thus forming a new two-part surname, or when children are given surnames combining those of both parents. Double-barrelled names may also be used by children who are not brought up by their birth-parents to combine the surname of a birth-parent with that of an adoptive parent, or the surname of their biological father with that of a stepfather. Other families believe that the act of consistently passing on only the father's name is patriarchal in nature, and choose double-barrelled names for feminist reasons.
Double-barrelled names are sometimes adopted when the man has a common surname such as Smith or Jones which the couple want to avoid after marriage; hence double-barrelled names often incorporate a common surname. For instance, when Mary Howard and John Smith marry each other, they become known as Mary and John Howard-Smith (with the man's surname usually going second). This name may sometimes be abbreviated, normally to the second half (Smith), particularly by later generations who may find the length of a double-barrelled name inconvenient.
Because of this avoidance of common surnames, and because many upper class families have double-barrelled surnames, it is often assumed that double-barrelled names indicate a certain pretentiousness or snobbishness on the part of the bearer. As noted above, however, double-barrelled names may be adopted for a number of quite different reasons.
A few upper-class families (e.g. Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe; Cave-Browne-Cave; Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound; Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby; Vane-Tempest-Stewart) have triple-barrelled surnames (created when a double-barrelled husband married a single-barrelled wife, or vice versa). Nowadays such names are almost always abbreviated in everyday use to a single- or double-barrelled version. There are even a few quadruple-barrelled surnames (e.g. Stirling-Home-Drummond-Moray; Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax) and the surname of the extinct family of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos was the quintuple-barrelled Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville.
Many double-barrelled names are written without a hyphen, e.g. John Maynard Smith, Iain Duncan Smith. (This can cause confusion as to whether the surname is double-barrelled or not.) One notable current example of this form of double-barrelling is Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose surname is now Lloyd Webber (not just Webber), though it used to be written with a hyphen, and so, confusingly, his peerage title is Baron Lloyd-Webber, with a hyphen. Notable persons with unhyphenated double-barrelled names include two former British Prime Ministers, David Lloyd George and Andrew Bonar Law, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.
In France a recent practice has been to use a double hyphen -- (not a long hyphen) to distinguish between recently formed double barrelled names and ancient hyphenated family names.
In Germany a double-barrelled name (German: Doppelname) is generally joined with a hyphen and includes only one hyphen. Other types of double-barrelled names are not accepted by restrictive German name law. However, exceptions are made for immigrants, and for marriages where the double-barrelled name already was the official name of one partner before marriage.
The song "Tom O'Malley-Finkel-Harris-Smith" by Lou Nathanson makes fun of this phenomenon by asking "What will happen when all the people with hyphenated last names start having grandchildren?" In the song, names are eventually limited by law to 10.