MeridianMERIDIAN

First Name

identity.person.first_name

Given name (first name). Locale-specific due to cultural naming conventions.

Casts to
VARCHAR
Scope
Locale-specific
Personal data
Yes — treat as PII
Locales
EN, EN_AU, EN_GB, EN_CA, EN_US, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, PL, RU, JA, ZH, KO, AR

Shape

Length 1 to 100 characters.

Pattern
^[\p{L}\s'\-]+$
ValueLengthShape
John4not checked
María5not checked
Jacques7not checked
太郎2not checked
محمد4not checked

pattern uses syntax this checker does not support

Background

Origin

The vCard format, RFC 6350, was published in August 2011.[1] Its N property holds a structured name whose components run in sequence from Family Names (also known as surnames) to Given Names, then Additional Names, Honorific Prefixes and Honorific Suffixes.[1]

HL7 FHIR R4 defines the given element of its HumanName datatype simply as Given name.[2] FHIR notes that the element is not called first name since given names do not always come first.[2] FHIR allows the given element to repeat, with a cardinality of 0..*.[2]

Use

In Japan, Korea and Hungary, names are ordered family name followed by given name(s).[3] The W3C advises trying to avoid the labels first name and last name in non-localised forms.[3] It suggests that, where possible, it is simpler to use the full name as the user provides it.[3] So a column headed first_name may hold a family name for some rows, depending on how the form was labelled and who filled it in; treat the header as a hint rather than a guarantee. (Meridian's view)

The W3C notes that a large number of people have names that consist of a given name only.[3] It warns against assuming that a single-letter name is an initial.[3] FHIR notes that if only initials are recorded, they may be used in place of the full name parts.[2] Expect single letters, initials and empty family-name fields in real files, and do not reject them as broken rows. (Meridian's view)

Patrick McKenzie's list of falsehoods programmers believe about names includes the beliefs that people's names are written in ASCII and that people's names do not change.[4]

Where you'll meet it

The Office for National Statistics publishes the most popular first names for baby boys and girls in England and Wales, using birth registration data.[5]

Sources

  1. [1]RFC 6350: vCard Format Specification | RFC Editorstandard
  2. [2]Datatypes-definitions - FHIR v4.0.1standard
  3. [3]Personal names around the worldsecondary source
  4. [4]Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Namessecondary source
  5. [5]Baby names in England and Wales: 2021 - Office for National Statisticsdataset

Detection notes

v1 migration: Was person.first_name. Locale-specific for cultural naming. Supports Unicode letters and common separators (apostrophes, hyphens).

Use it

CLI · DuckDB
$ finetype infer -i "John" --mode column
→ identity.person.first_name

SELECT ft_infer('John');
-- → 'identity.person.first_name'
Cast expression
CAST({col} AS VARCHAR)

Schema

https://meridian.online/schemas/identity.person.first_name · Frictionless type string

finetype taxonomy identity.person.first_name -o json-schema

Aliases

given_name

Type Registry