Person name

A person name is a linguistic designation used to identify an individual human being.

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Written by Support Desk
Last updated Jan 08, 2026

About person names

A person name is a linguistic designation used to uniquely or conventionally identify an individual human being within a cultural, legal, or social context.
  • A person name designates an individual entity, not a general concept.
  • A person name may comprise multiple name components (e.g. given name, family name, patronymic, matronymic, title, suffix), the structure of which is culture- and jurisdiction-dependent.
  • A person may be associated with multiple person names over time or across contexts (e.g. legal name, preferred name, pseudonym, stage name).
  • Person names may have variants (orthographic, transliterated, abbreviated) that refer to the same individual.
This definition is consistent with ISO 704 and ISO 1087-1 principles, and aligns with name authority and identity management practices used in libraries and research systems.

Distinction or terms from related entities

  • Person name vs term: a person name identifies a specific individual; a term designates a general concept.
  • Person name vs concept: a person name refers to an instance; a concept is an abstract unit of knowledge.
  • Person name vs identifier: a person name is linguistic and human-readable; an identifier (e.g. ORCID, employee ID) is a system-assigned reference.

Person name metadata

  1. Family name, also known as the last name in western culture
  2. Name type (e.g., name at birth, married name, legal name)
  3. Other names, all other names aside from the family name (use Uppercase when denoting a new name, lower case for particles (e.g., von, de)
  4. Role: Select how you intend to use this concept:
    • Preferred: primarily the one to use
    • Admitted: a variety of this same terms
    • Deprecated: this concept is no long er in use
  5. Status: Identify the status of adding this concept
    • Draft: needs more info
    • Under review: by another person
    • Approved for use but not yet published
    • Published and available
    • There is a wide variety of status stages (see also 'Terminology workflow')
  6. Language: designate which language this concept has been added using (e.g., English)
  7. Note: add any other information that is relevant (e.g., a guidance note on the use of this concept)

Relationships

Person names can have a range of relationships with other records:
  1. Relationships with specific records (e.g., concepts, terms, or organization names):
    • Select the relationships type and use a shortcut key to tag another term to link them together
  2. Collections: tags that identify what collection(s) you have used this term in
  3. Documents: tags that identify what document9s) you have used this term in

Authority & Source

  1. Authority refers to an organization of group that provided evidence for the use of this term (e.g., judicial, government, published)
    • Authority type: select the type of entity that provided authority for this term to exist
    • Add the description of the authority or use the shortcut key to select the an existing person or oganization from your terminology data
  2. Source refers to the external documentary evidence you used for compiling this record
    • The title of the reference work that contains this evidence (the work should be in your reference library)
    • Use the backslash key and enter the title to link the reference record
    • Open the library record for this source by clicking the library icon
    • Add a new reference record to your library by clicking the + icon

Adding a list into a document

When writing, a smart list of names can be generated from the terminology records that you have used in your document,
  1. A smart list will produce a list of all names found in your document across all sections
  2. See Style Guide / Terminology for editing the format of smart lists

Tips

  • Create different collections for easy maintenance, exporting, or sharing
  • We do not produce a list of work items, quotes, paraphrase, text blocks or websites as these are generally not required when writing documents.
  • You can export any collection in full directly from the collection record
  • If a name has been added in multiple places and needs updating, you can do so by editing the record and it will automatically update all instances
    • For example, changing a characters name, fixing a typo
    • If the name has been altered, add a new record

See also

  • Adding a collection of terms
  • Exporting a collection of terms
  • Annotations / Add terms
  • Style Guide / Terminology smart lists