Hacker News Reader

Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

http://www.historyrundown.com/top-5-people-with-the-longest-...

There's a couple of people for you with legal names well past 500 characters, and that's just of Western European descent, where German-style compound words are rare.

View on HN

Most certainly, percentile wise, they're the 99th. Nearly every case where I encountered a name that long though, there was a shorter form. Generally really long names are either patronymic/matronymic (listing ancestors) like many Arabic names, or names following Hispanic conventions. Hawaiian names can also sometimes be rather impressive.

For instance Pablo Picasso's full name is 103 characters (without whitespace): Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

Is a thing of the past. In Spain is currently illegal to register a baby with more than two first names, except if she/he belongs to the royal family.

The last name's list on the other hand can be technically infinite but only the first two (from both: father and mother) are used normally.

You can have also as many pseudonyms as you want of course, but they aren't official names.

Worked with a guy with a really long set of names. Found out much later that what I thought was his first name (which he went by) was actually the initials of his names before the family name.

That's a pretty common way for people to modify their names into a more practical form (I'm sure typing all that out is a pain). This is why you shouldn't ever assume properties of people's names, and should instead write UIs which confirm the name's properties with the user.

Just for fun, I wrote a quick query to pull the head from my DB.

  NAME_LENGTH_CHARS, NAME_TEXT
  91 'Mary Abigail KawenaʻUlaokalaniahiʻIakaikapoliopelekawahineʻAihonuaināleilehuaapele Wiggin Pukui'
  85 'Upatissa Atapattu Bandaranayake Wasala Mudiyanse Ralahamilage Shirani Anshumala Bandaranayake'
  83 'Wanisekara Bandaranayake Wasala Mudiyanse Ralahamilage Aluwihare Uda Walauwe Alick Aluwihare'
  68 'Guido Georg Friedrich Erdmann Heinrich Adalbert Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck'
  66 'Wasalakulathunga Wijekoon Mudiyanselage Duleeka Kumari Wijekoon Marapana'
  65 'Clemens Erwein Heinrich Karl Bonaventura Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein'
  59 'Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisière'
  58 'Weerasooriya Dissanayake Mudiyanselage Punchi Banda Dissanayake'
  56 'Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis, seigneur de Saint-Évremond'
  56 'Venerable Professor Kollupitiye Mahinda Sangharakkhitha Thera'
  ...

(EDIT TO ADD: These are all names initially sourced from Wikipedia)

Did you really just pull out random people names from your database and posted them online?

No these are all names of public figures pulled from Wikipedia, not names submitted by individuals, because of the obvious privacy violations. Each name has a corresponding Wikipedia article. I should have clarified initially though.

For instance:

  #1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kawena_Pukui
  #2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirani_Bandaranayake
  #3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alick_Aluwihare

#2 and #3 on that list were clearly done as publicity stunts/"testing the limits" Bobby Tables-style than anything occurring naturally.

What does "naturally" even mean here? Everyone these days seems to be giving their kids unique names. Some people name their kid Obi-wan Kenobi. That's not really any different than these people, is it?

Obi-wan Kenobi isn't all that odd --- to someone unknown to Star Wars, it wouldn't stand out among a list of other foreign-sounding names.

On the other hand, an ultra-long name that seems to be designed for testing overflows, in buffers mental or physical, is like a very different category to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com