’Jacqueline’ is the hardest name to spell

Having to spell your name when dealing with a call centre operator is a source of frustration to an increasing number of people, especially those called 'Jacqueline' or 'Patricia', concludes a study of how people's personal names are recorded, released by King's College London. Inconsistency in how people's names are recorded is not just a source of annoyance for consumers. Businesses and government increasingly invest resources in linking together information about the same person held in different files. If a person's name is represented differently on different files, it is far from certain that this information will be linked together accurately. The study, undertaken by Richard Webber, Visiting Professor in the Department of Geography, King's College London, made use of a series of databases supplied for this purpose by the information services company, Experian. From these databases information was assembled on how the names of 600,000,000 European and American adults are held on files keyed in by businesses and government organisations. The purpose of the study was both to record the million or more different personal names in current use and to list the different ways in which the more frequently occurring personal names are represented.