My passport already prints my given name first. Do I follow the passport or my home order?

Follow the passport. The Latin spelling in the machine-readable zone is the version every other document should repeat. Your home order stays on your home documents; the form in front of you gets the passport version.

The form has no middle-name box. Where do my patronymic and second surname go?

The patronymic goes into the given-name field; both Spanish surnames go together into the last-name field. Nothing is dropped — a missing element is a common reason a record fails to match later.

My ticket spells my name differently from my passport. Will anyone care?

Yes — a ticket-passport mismatch is a routine check-in refusal. Ask for the ticket to be reissued in the passport spelling rather than hoping the difference is small enough to pass.

Should I copy the comma from 'Kiss, Janos' into an English form?

No. The comma is only a marker showing which element is the family name on mixed Hungarian forms. On the English form, Janos goes in the first-name box and Kiss in the last-name box, with no comma.

44characters in each of the 2 machine-readable passport lines

33letters in the Russian alphabet, against 26 in Latin

2civil surnames every Spanish child has held since 1999

6tones in written Vietnamese

Family-first name, Western form

Hithanya — Personal-name conventions across countries | hithanya.com

If your country writes the family name first, a Western form's 'first name / last name' boxes are asking for a different order than your documents show. The fix is mechanical: your given name goes in the first-name box, your family name in the last-name box, in the spelling your passport's machine-readable zone already uses. Everything below shows how to do that without losing a middle, patronymic or compound element.

hithanya.com
Names, order, scripts — an independent field notebook
Name order, patronymics and transliteration — a field guide for forms that assume the Western order.

Three numbers to remember

The short version

6tones in written VietnameseVietnamese writes six tones with five marks on a 29-letter alphabet, so the marks far outnumber what plain Latin fields can show.

4German characters that expand in machine-readable fieldsThe three umlauts and the sharp s become ae, oe, ue and ss — each taking two character slots instead of one.

61years McCune-Reischauer lasted in KoreaAdopted in 1939 and replaced by Revised Romanization in 2000, which is why old atlases print Pusan and current passports print Busan.

Key numbers

The numbers that decide how your name fits a form
Rule or standard	In force	Key number	What it does to your name
ICAO Doc 9303 passport zone	current	2 lines × 44 characters	Names past the limit are truncated; extra given names collapse to one initial each
Russian alphabet vs Latin	—	33 letters into 26	Conversion must find extra characters for yo, the two signs and five collapsed letters
Pinyin / ISO 7098	1958; ISO 1982	4 tones	Passports drop the tone marks, so one spelling covers several readings
Vietnamese writing	—	29 letters, 6 tones, 5 marks	Five marks must cover six tones, and plain fields show none of them
German expansion rule	—	4 characters → 2 slots each	Umlauts and sharp s become ae, oe, ue, ss and lengthen the name where space is tightest
GOST 16876-71 → GOST 7.79-2000	1971–2000	2 replacement systems (A and B)	One Cyrillic letter can carry two approved Latin spellings
Korean romanization	1939–2000	61 years of McCune-Reischauer	Pre-2000 maps print Pusan; current passports print Busan

The numbers that decide how your name fits a form

Which element is your 'last name'?

The last name a form wants is your family name — the inherited, shared element — wherever it happens to stand on the page.

China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia and Hungary write the family name first; most of Europe and the Americas put the given name first. The same string of characters flips meaning between the two orders, so a form built in one tradition misreads a name written in the other.

The mapping never changes: 'first name' means your given name, 'last name' means your family name. You are not reproducing your home order — you are labelling the elements so a given-first system can file you correctly.

If the split is not obvious, use the markers your own bureaucracy prints. Hungary writes 'Kiss Janos' family-first in daily documents but 'Kiss, Janos' with a comma on mixed forms, because without the comma there is no way to tell which of the two elements is the family name.

China — family name first in writing
Japan — family name first
South Korea — family name first
Vietnam — family name first
Mongolia — family name first
Hungary — family name first, with a comma on mixed forms
Most of Europe and the Americas — given name first

Terms the forms assume you know

Given name: The personal element chosen at birth — Janos in 'Kiss Janos'. Forms call it the first name wherever it stands in the written order.
Family name (surname): The inherited element shared by a family line. Forms call it the last name even in countries where it is written first.
Patronymic: An element built from the parent's given name — Icelandic -son/-dottir, Russian -ovich/-ovna. It is rebuilt every generation and is never an inherited surname.
Matronymic: The same construction built from the mother's given name rather than the father's; the rebuild-every-generation logic is identical.
Transliteration: Letter-by-letter conversion of a name between scripts under one published system, so the result can be repeated exactly on every document.
Machine-readable zone (MRZ): The two 44-character lines defined by ICAO Doc 9303 at the foot of a passport page — the spelling every other document should copy.

What people actually ask

My passport already prints my given name first. Do I follow the passport or my home order?: Follow the passport. The Latin spelling in the machine-readable zone is the version every other document should repeat. Your home order stays on your home documents; the form in front of you gets the passport version.
The form has no middle-name box. Where do my patronymic and second surname go?: The patronymic goes into the given-name field; both Spanish surnames go together into the last-name field. Nothing is dropped — a missing element is a common reason a record fails to match later.
My ticket spells my name differently from my passport. Will anyone care?: Yes — a ticket-passport mismatch is a routine check-in refusal. Ask for the ticket to be reissued in the passport spelling rather than hoping the difference is small enough to pass.
Should I copy the comma from 'Kiss, Janos' into an English form?: No. The comma is only a marker showing which element is the family name on mixed Hungarian forms. On the English form, Janos goes in the first-name box and Kiss in the last-name box, with no comma.

How this guide was assembled

Every entry here is built from published standards and statutes: ICAO Doc 9303, ISO 9:1995 and ISO 7098, GOST 16876-71 and GOST 7.79-2000, BGN/PCGN romanization, Spain's Ley 40/1999 and South Korea's Revised Romanization of 2000. Where two standards conflict, the page says so instead of quietly picking a favourite. No practice described here comes from invented cases.

Sources and standards

The source list cites the standards and statutes named above; nothing on this site relies on anonymous forums or marketing pages.