Double-barrelled name

In English-speaking cultures, 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.

Related Topics:
Family name - Bowes-Lyon - Fraser Darling - Double-barrelled shotgun

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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.

Related Topics:
Marriage - Children - Parent - Adoptive - Patriarchal - Feminist

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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.

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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.

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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.

Related Topics:
Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe - Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound - Vane-Tempest-Stewart - Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax - Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos

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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, and the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. 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.

Related Topics:
John Maynard Smith - Iain Duncan Smith - Andrew Lloyd Webber - Peerage - Baron Lloyd-Webber - David Lloyd George - Andrew Bonar Law - Ralph Vaughan Williams - France

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