Overview

• Guinness World Records updated its entry this week, shifting the category from longest Christian name to longest personal name and counting 2,253 unique words.
• The tally was revised from an earlier Guinness figure of 2,310 after a change to record guidelines clarified how entries are counted.
• Watkins’ name change was accepted by a district court but initially rejected by a registrar, prompting a High Court case that he won.
• New Zealand later tightened naming rules, including banning titles as names, making it unlikely others there can repeat his approach.
• The Sydney-based New Zealander assembled many of the names from books while working in a library and has faced administrative hurdles such as extra passport and birth-certificate pages.