Hithanya — Personal-name conventions across countries | hithanya.com
Written name order is a national convention, not a personal habit — and every form you meet was designed for exactly one of the two orders.
Two blocs exist. China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia and Hungary write the family name first; most of Europe and the Americas write the given name first. The same string of characters flips meaning between the two orders, which is why a form from one bloc systematically misreads a name written in the other.
The field mapping never changes: 'first name' means the given name and 'last name' means the family name, whatever order your home documents print. A Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian or Hungarian name is therefore entered in the reverse of its home order on a Western form — and that reversal is correct, not a mistake.
Hungary is the family-first outlier inside Europe and shows the ambiguity best. Daily documents write 'Kiss Janos' family-first; mixed forms switch to 'Kiss, Janos' with a comma, because without a comma there is no way to tell which of the two elements is the family name. On an English form the comma disappears: Janos fills the first-name box, Kiss the last-name box.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Spain complicates the family-name field rather than the order. Since the 1999 reform (Ley 40/1999) every child holds two civil surnames — the father's first surname followed by the mother's first — and parents may choose which of the two orders their own children take. Both surnames together are the family name and travel into the last-name field as a unit.
Iceland breaks the scheme entirely: the surname is rebuilt every generation from the parent's given name plus -son or -dottir, so no fixed family name exists. The patronymic still occupies the last-name field on foreign forms, because that is what the passport prints there — the patronymics page explains why this is consistent rather than wrong.
Once the elements are mapped, the remaining risk is spelling. The transliteration page shows how to keep one Latin spelling across passport, visa and ticket, so the correctly ordered name also survives conversion between scripts.
Further reading