Second name or Surname in British English

I have recently been told by a Londoner that "second name" is the most common way of referring to one's surname. She explained that it arose from the fact that most people just use their first and last names, therefore "second name" and "last name" became synonyms.

This has given me some food for thought and I've become curious on a couple of points:

1. Is this practice in use elsewhere?
2. Does it cause misunderstandings when a person happens to have a middle name and, therefore, second and last name aren't coincident?
3. So, in this fictitious name, what could be called what?
   • Mary (first name)
   • Sue (middle name / ?second name? or ?second given name?)
   • Smith (surname / family name / last name / ?second name?)

On a slightly different note, when non-English names that have multiple surnames are involved, how would one refer to them? For example: Ana Maria Silva dos Santos Pereira, where "Ana Maria" correspond to 2 given names and "Silva dos Santos Pereira" correspond to 3 family names (typically inherited from both mother and father's side).

4) Would everything in between "Ana" and "Pereira" be considered middle names?

Solution 1:

Your London friend is sadly misinformed. Here iss the British English only corpus from Google NGrams:

So Brits definitely stick with surname, but in the United States of America, there has been a noticeable shift towards last name in recent decades:

Probably most Anglophones have one middle name, but there are plenty of people who only have a first name and a surname. And many people have two or more of what I've never heard called anything other than middle names (first and middle names collectively are called forenames).

Over recent decades, people increasingly tend to avoid the religious implications of christian name. Somewhat surprisingly to me, it appears first name is more favoured in the United States of America than Britain, but I suppose that is more by analogy with last name than because of secularist leanings.

Forms such as given, birth, married name etc., are relatively uncommon, in that they're only normally used in contexts where they're needed to disambiguate. Usually, given name(s) are forename(s) your parents gave you at birth, if these aren't what you call yourself in later life (for whatever reason). That can also apply to birth name, but this is also used to contrast with the married name (most women still adopt their husband's surname, which may also be indicated by Mrs. Smith, née Jones).

As the charts show, second name is quite rare compared to surname (and last name in the US). Here is a link to a chart showing it is equally rare compared to first name, Christian name, and middle name. Partly because it's uncommon, it has no established unambiguous definition. Here is a typical online entry:

second name (second names, plural) Someone's second name is their family name, or the name that comes after their first name and before their family name.
(where family name is just a somewhat less common alternative to surname).

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Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (4th edition) © 2003

And a "real" dictionary (such as the Oxford English Dictionary) does not even bother to define such a vague collocation. As various comments indicate, it could also mean a nickname, stagename, alias, nom-de-plume, etc. In fact, to different people in different times and places, second name can mean just about any name or part of a name that's not the first name. It is no more meaningful than other name outside of context (personally I think it sounds a bit childish and uneducated, but that's just me! :).

Solution 2:

As a Brit, I would never think that second name meant surname.

I have one forename and a surname. If asked for my 'second name', I would assume that the person were asking for my second forename and would answer that "I don't have one".

As mentioned in a comment, I have noticed that web forms from US organisations tend to use last name when Brits would be more likely to use surname.

Solution 3:

While anecdotal, as a Brit (and Londoner), were someone to ask me what my "second name" was, I'd answer with my middle name.

Less anecdotally, here's the advice for changing your name by deed poll, from the UK government website. Which clearly uses "surname".