Personal name

A personal name or full name refers to the set of names by which an individual is known and that can be recited as a word-group, with the understanding that, taken together, they all relate to that one individual. In many cultures, the term is synonymous with the birth and legal names of the individual, see below. In many cultures, individuals possess a variety of names, in others they are known by a single name; when a plurality of names occur, some are specific to the individual, distinguishing them from related individuals (e.g., John Adams and John Quincy Adams), while other names indicate the person's relationship to or membership in a family, clan, or other social structure (as for Charles Philip Arthur George and one of his namesakes), or even to unrelated others (e.g., as for Leonardo Da Vinci and his namesake).

In Western culture, nearly all individuals possess at least one given name (also known as a personal name, first name, forename, or Christian name), together with a surname (also known as a family name, last name, or gentile name)—respectively, the Thomas and Jefferson in Thomas Jefferson—the latter to indicate that the individual belongs to a family, a tribe, or a clan. Inserted between these are one or more "middle names" (e.g., Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles John Huffam Dickens, Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise Mountbatten-Windsor), further establishing such family and broader relationships. Some cultures, including Western, also add (or once added) patronymics or matronymics, for instance, via a middle name as with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (son of pater Ilya), or via a last name as with Björk Guðmundsdóttir (daughter of pater Guðmund) or Heiðar Helguson (son of mater Helga). Similar concepts are present in Eastern cultures.

.name

The domain name "name" is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. It is intended for use by individuals for representation of their personal name, nicknames, screen names, pseudonyms, or other types of identification labels.

The top-level domain was founded by Hakon Haugnes and Geir Rasmussen and initially delegated to Global Name Registry in 2001, and become fully operational in January 2002. Verisign was the outsourced operator for .name since the .name launch in 2002 and acquired Global Name Registry in 2008.

On the .name TLD, domains may be registered on the second level (john.name) and the third level (john.doe.name). It is also possible to register an e-mail address of the form [email protected]. Such an e-mail address may have to be a forwarding account and require another e-mail address as the recipient address, or may be treated as a conventional email address (such as [email protected]), depending on the registrar.

When a domain is registered on the third level (john.doe.name), the second level (doe.name in this case) is shared, and may not be registered by any individual. Other second level domains like johndoe.name remain unaffected.

Name

A name is a term used for identification. Names can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. A personal name identifies, not necessarily uniquely, a specific individual human. The name of a specific entity is sometimes called a proper name (although that term has a philosophical meaning also) and is, when consisting of only one word, a proper noun. Other nouns are sometimes called "common names" or (obsolete) "general names". A name can be given to a person, place, or thing; for example, parents can give their child a name or scientist can give an element a name.

Caution must be exercised when translating, for there are ways that one language may prefer one type of name over another. A feudal naming habit is used sometimes in other languages: the French sometimes refer to Aristotle as "le Stagirite" from one spelling of his place of birth, and English speakers often refer to Shakespeare as "The Bard", recognizing him as a paragon writer of the language. Also, claims to preference or authority can be refuted: the British did not refer to Louis-Napoleon as Napoleon III during his rule.

Identifier

An identifier is a name that identifies (that is, labels the identity of) either a unique object or a unique class of objects, where the "object" or class may be an idea, physical [countable] object (or class thereof), or physical [noncountable] substance (or class thereof). The abbreviation ID often refers to identity, identification (the process of identifying), or an identifier (that is, an instance of identification). An identifier may be a word, number, letter, symbol, or any combination of those.

The words, numbers, letters, or symbols may follow an encoding system (wherein letters, digits, words, or symbols stand for (represent) ideas or longer names) or they may simply be arbitrary. When an identifier follows an encoding system, it is often referred to as a code or ID code. Identifiers that do not follow any encoding scheme are often said to be arbitrary IDs; they are arbitrarily assigned and have no greater meaning. (Sometimes identifiers are called "codes" even when they are actually arbitrary, whether because the speaker believes that they have deeper meaning or simply because he is speaking casually and imprecisely.)