German Names

Structure & order

The standard ("Western") order is:

[GIVEN] [SURNAME]: e.g. Johann Schmidt

It is common to register several given names (Vornamen), one of which is the everyday Rufname ("call name"):

[GIVEN1 (Rufname)] [GIVEN2] … [SURNAME]: e.g. Erika Maria Schmidt

In some southern dialects (notably Bavaria and parts of Austria) colloquial speech can place the family name first ([FAMILY] [GIVEN]), but official documents use the Western order. Nobility historically prefixed the von particle to the surname (see below).

Given names

• Sources: historically Germanic dithematic compounds (Bern-hard "bear-strong", Ger-trud), later largely supplanted by Christian/biblical names (Johannes, Maria, Elisabeth) and, in the modern era, a wide international stock.
• Multiple names & the Rufname: giving a child two or more Vornamen is normal; one is the Rufname used in daily life. German nobility historically carried six or more forenames.
• Registration (the Standesamt rule): every given name must be approved by the local civil-registration office (Standesamt). A name may not be a surname, a product or an object; may not be obviously offensive or harmful to the child; and may not be something that is essentially "not a name". Names associated with evil (Satan, Lucifer) or held religiously insensitive are refused. Historically a name had to clearly indicate the child's sex, with the long-standing exception that Maria may be a second name for a boy; the Federal Constitutional Court has since held that gender-neutral given names are permissible. A rejected name can be appealed or replaced.

Family names & patronymics

German surnames developed in the Late Middle Ages and fall into four classic origin types:

1. Patronymic, from the father's given name, often with genitive -s or the northern -sen ("son of"): Petersen, Hansen, Ahrens, Friedrich, Benz.
2. Occupational, the most common type, frequently ending in -er, -macher ("maker"), -hauer ("cutter") or -mann: Müller ("miller"), Schmidt/Schmied ("blacksmith", < Middle High German smid), Fischer ("fisherman"), Schneider ("tailor"), Bauer ("farmer"). Because such trades existed in every village, Müller and Schmidt became the two most frequent surnames in Germany.
3. Locative / toponymic, from a place of origin or dwelling, often with -er meaning "from/of": Bayer ("Bavarian"), Kissinger (from Kissingen), Frankfurter.
4. Descriptive (nickname), from a physical or character trait: Klein ("small"), Gross ("big"), Krause ("curly[-haired]"), Braun/Brun ("brown[-haired]"), Lang ("tall").

The von nobility particle. von ("of/from") prefixed to a surname historically marked the landed nobility; if someone was baron of the village of Veltheim, his family name was von Veltheim. With the abolition of the German monarchy in 1919, von lost its legal privilege and became simply a fixed, hereditary part of the surname. Like the Dutch tussenvoegsel (see Dutch Names), it is written lowercase mid-name and is conventionally ignored in alphabetisation (so von Humboldt sorts under H). Variants include zu, and contracted vom, von der.

Marriage names (new law, 1 May 2025). Couples may now combine both surnames into a joint marriage name, with or without a hyphen, e.g. Schmidt-Meyer, Meyer-Schmidt, Schmidt Meyer or Meyer Schmidt, a notable liberalisation of the older single-marriage-name rule.

How to address someone

• Base honorifics: Herr (Mr.) and Frau (Ms./Mrs.) precede the surname: Herr Schmidt, Frau Müller. The diminutive Fräulein ("Miss") was dropped from official use in 1972 and is now considered potentially insulting unless requested.
• Formal/informal pronoun register: the formal Sie (capitalised) contrasts with the familiar du; switching to du is a social step that is usually offered explicitly.
• Academic-title stacking: academic titles attach between the honorific and the name and can be stacked in a strict hierarchy. A doctor is Herr Doktor / Frau Doktor; a professor (who almost always also holds a doctorate) is addressed in full as Herr Professor Doktor [Name] (written Prof. Dr. [Name]). Multiple doctorates may be doubled (Doktor Doktor / Dr. Dr.) in very formal contexts (letter addresses, the opening of speeches, formal introductions). The professorship is often dropped before the doctorate in continued conversation; Professor or Doktor used alone is correct but reads as less formal. Titles take feminine forms, Professorin, and in Austria Magistra for Magister.
• Austrian title culture: Austria retains a far richer use of professional/academic titles than Germany: Magister (Mag., master's level), Diplom-Ingenieur (Dipl.-Ing. / DI), Ingenieur, and historical civil-service titles (Hofrat). Such titles are routinely used with Herr / Frau and may be entered in official documents (diplomas/doctorates placed before the name; bachelor/master/PhD placed after). German-speaking Switzerland is comparatively sparing with titles in everyday address.

Pitfalls for software

• The von particle is part of the surname unit (not a separate token), is lowercase mid-name, and is ignored in alphabetical sorting, parallel to the Dutch tussenvoegsel. See Surname Formation and Dutch Names.
• Multiple given names mean the first registered name is not necessarily the Rufname; software should not assume the everyday name is name #1.
• Stacked titles (Herr Professor Doktor, Prof. Dr. Dr.) can prefix a name with several non-name tokens; parsers must treat Prof., Dr., Mag., Dipl.-Ing. etc. as titles, not given names, and Austrian data carries many more of them. See Salutations and Address.
• Occupational/descriptive surnames are common nouns (Müller, Schmidt, Klein, Braun), so a surname can be a homograph of an ordinary German word, a frequent source of misclassification.
• Marriage names since 1 May 2025 may be hyphenated or space-separated combinations of two surnames (Meyer Schmidt), which a parser can mistake for a middle name plus surname.
• ß / ss and umlaut transliteration: Schmidt/Schmid/Schmitt and Müller/Mueller are spelling variants of the same etymon, complicating matching and de-duplication.