Most of us complain when Starbucks misspells our name. Laurence Watkins, on the other hand, made sure no one could ever spell his name right because it’s 2,253 words long.
In 1990, Laurence Gregory Watkins, a mild-mannered librarian from New Zealand, decided to do something spectacularly unnecessary but unforgettable. He legally changed his name to include 2,000 middle names, all handpicked from books or suggested by colleagues.
A couple of years later, he thought, “Why stop there?” and added 253 more, taking his case all the way to the High Court after the Registrar General said, “Yeah… no.”
He fought, he won, and by 1992, Guinness World Records officially crowned him the man with the longest personal name on Earth, all 2,253 unique words of it.

Wanna guess how long it takes to read his name?
20 minutes just to say it aloud.
Watkins’ favorite middle name is AZ2000. You know his little inside joke about having names from A to Z and over 2,000 in total. Ironically, the government later changed two laws to make sure no one else could pull this off again.
Sometimes, the quest for identity goes from a hobby… to a stupid headline.
It’s like running a marathon backward just to say you did. Also, Guinness World Records can be fun, even weird, but this one?
It’s bureaucratic chaos dressed up as ambition.
Anyone with a few hundred dollars, a printer, and enough caffeine could technically break this “record.” But that’s what makes it so absurd.
It’s not a test of skill, endurance, or even creativity. It’s a paperwork stunt. The man didn’t climb Everest, he climbed a pile of legal documents until the court said, “Fine, whatever, just stop coming here.”
And yeah, government IDs?
Forget it.
His full name probably doesn’t fit in any official form, not a driver’s license, not a passport, maybe not even a census entry. Somewhere in a database, he’s probably just “Laurence G. Watkins (CONT’D).”
Look, people will do anything for a weird headline, especially in an era where attention is currency. But there’s also something kind of poetic about it: A librarian who literally built his identity out of words.
Still, I can’t help but imagine the poor soul at immigration trying to say, “Welcome to New Zealand, Mr. Laurence Gregory…” and then giving up halfway through. Heck, even Guinness gave up writing his full name.
THE WHY: VANITY
3 stars out of 5 for this one because it’s unnecessarily weird. No danger, no chaos, just a man legally drowning in his own middle names for the sake of a record anyone could beat.
“Look, most of us want a normal life without any drama, but life in this world is always strange, and uncertain.
I don’t need your email. I don’t want to bug you with a billion notifications. All I ask is this, if you felt something here, if this made you think, laugh, or even shake your head in disbelief, just bookmark ‘Averagebeing.com’ and come back tomorrow.
That’s it. No strings. Just you, me, and this stupid world.”