Voltaire's one-word name was a disguised anagram of his real one
After a spell in the Bastille, François-Marie Arouet rebranded himself in 1718 as Voltaire. The name scrambles a Latinised Arouet the younger, flips the syllables of his father's home town, and echoes French words for daring. He joined a long line of people known by just one name.
A mononym is simply a single-word name, from the Greek for single and name. For much of history this was normal. Alulim, the first king of Sumer, and the Egyptian pharaoh Narmer are among the earliest recorded, and Greeks such as Plato and Socrates had only one name; epithets like Zeno of Elea were added later to tell namesakes apart. Romans broke the pattern with two or three names, yet we still call many of them by one, such as Cicero or Nero. Today single names remain common in Afghanistan, Bhutan, Myanmar, Mongolia, Tibet and South India.
Voltaire's choice was deliberate: his family name sounded uncomfortably like a French word for a rake and a phrase about thrashing. Other writers picked single names for their own reasons. Marie-Henri Beyle took Stendhal from the Prussian town where his hero Winckelmann was born, and Eduard Douwes Dekker wrote as Multatuli, Latin for I have borne much, when attacking colonial abuses in the Dutch East Indies. The painter Bernardo Bellotto borrowed his famous uncle's nickname, Canaletto, in Poland and Germany, where he is still known by it.
Rules differ by country. Japan's emperor and his family have no surname at all, though Japanese speakers politely avoid using his given name. Indonesia, where many Javanese once had single names, stopped allowing them for newborns in 2022. Turkey adopted surnames only after World War I under Atatürk. In Canada, after decades of imposed Western names, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission urged provinces to let Indigenous people legally take traditional names, and Ontario now permits single names for members of nations with that custom.
Popes usually take one regnal name, though John Paul I chose a double one to honour two predecessors. Some modern figures go all the way: the magician Teller holds a United States passport under his single name. Software lags behind, and many forms still demand a surname, prompting users to type a full stop or repeat their name.
Source: Mononym
