Terminology

If you read the source you'll come across a small vocabulary of words that don't quite mean what they mean in plain English. Here's what each of them refers to.

Namon

A namon is one of the five role slots a piece of a name can fill:

Namon	Aliases	Example
Namon.PREFIX	prefix, px, p	Mr, Dr
Namon.FIRST_NAME	firstName, first, fn, f	John
Namon.MIDDLE_NAME	middleName, middle, mid, mn, m	Joe
Namon.LAST_NAME	lastName, last, ln, l	Smith
Namon.SUFFIX	suffix, sx, s	PhD, Jr

When the library asks for "which slot does this go in?", it means Namon.

The word is invented — it's the singular form of nama, below. There's no point looking it up.

Nama

A nama is a collection of namon, the same way criteria is a collection of criterion. Two namon (a first and a last, say) joined together form a nama. You'll see this in the source as the type of compound name input.

You will almost never need to use this word yourself. It's mostly internal vocabulary.

Name

A Name is a class wrapping a single namon (a string) with a little extra capability — capitalization, initial extraction, equality. You construct one via the named constructors:

import { Name } from 'namefully';

Name.first('Jane');
Name.middle('Marie');
Name.last('Smith');
Name.prefix('Dr');
Name.suffix('PhD');

Two specialised subclasses exist: FirstName and LastName. Both can hold additional values (an extra given name, a mother's surname) — see Compound names.

FullName

A FullName is all five namon — at most — composed into one object. It's the internal representation Namefully works against. You can construct one directly, but most of the time you'll use the Namefully constructor or NameBuilder and never see FullName by name.

Namefully

Namefully is the public class. It wraps a FullName and exposes the formatting / accessor API the rest of these docs are about. Every Namefully instance is immutable — see Immutability & Config.

Putting it together

A short cheat sheet of the relationships:

Namefully                      — the public class you instantiate
└── FullName                   — its internal name container
        └── Name × up to 5     — one per namon (slot)
              └── Namon        — the slot tag

That's the whole vocabulary. Everything else is just method names.