Name standards

namefully is built around a single canonical name shape:

[prefix] firstName [middleName] lastName [suffix]

The brackets mean the part is optional. The most basic case is therefore John Smith, where John is the firstName and Smith the lastName.

The model is borrowed from this UK naming-practice guide — the same one the library has cited since v1. It's not perfect (no name standard is), but it covers the overwhelming majority of name shapes you'll encounter in everyday software, and it gives the API a clean vocabulary to work with.

A worked example

Take Mr John Joe Smith PhD and namefully will read it as:

Slot	Value
prefix	Mr
first	John
middle	Joe
last	Smith
suffix	PhD
full	Mr John Joe Smith PhD
birth	John Joe Smith
short	John Smith
public	John S
salutation	Mr Smith
initials()	['J', 'J', 'S']

If a slot is empty (no prefix, no middle name, no suffix), Namefully simply skips it in the renderings that care.

Order of appearance matters

By default Namefully reads a string in first-name-first order — so 'John Smith' becomes first = John, last = Smith. That can be flipped per-instance:

import { Namefully, NameOrder } from 'namefully';

const name = new Namefully('Smith John Joe', {
  orderedBy: NameOrder.LAST_NAME,
});

name.last;  // 'Smith'
name.first; // 'John'

The order you pick when constructing an instance is the default for every output of that instance. You can override it on a single call (name.fullName(NameOrder.FIRST_NAME)) but the configured order is the source of truth for everything else.

See Name order in the Configuration page for the full story.

What the standard doesn't cover

A few common shapes the standard intentionally doesn't try to model:

• Mononyms (Plato, Madonna) — not supported in v1.3.1; arrived in v2. See What's new in v2.
• Nicknames in the middle (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) — not directly modelled. Use NameIndex or a custom parser.
• Multiple prefixes or suffixes (Prof. Dr. Einstein) — not supported. Fold the extras into the single prefix/suffix slot or hide them outside the library.

The library leans on the standard hard enough that bending it usually means reaching for NameBuilder, NameIndex, or a custom Parser rather than overloading the basic constructor.