This happens with western names as well. Jo, Bo, Malcolm X.

Wasn't he just known as X though? His legal name would have been Islamic and his birth name was Little.

If you are Malcom X and you create, let's say, a Facebook account, then your last name is X.

Harry S Truman's middle name was the letter S.

Ditto Ulysses S Grant (though he wasn’t born with that name).

One of my first programming tasks as an intern was figuring out why the search function for a directory couldn't find certain users. It was the same reason you have, it just didn't return results until it had 3 or more characters!

A former UN Secretary General U Thant was actually named just Thant, with "U" being a honorific (King od like "Mr"). And the first Burmese prime minister was actually named Nu (formally U Nu). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Nu

I used to know of someone who’s middle name (not just initial) was “E”. One letter.

I think there's some computer scientist (or similar) whose given name is just R, I forget what their last name is though.

And apparently Johnny Cash was born J. R. Cash.

From Wikipedia:

His mother wanted to name him John and his father preferred to name him Ray, so J. R. ended up being the only compromise they could agree on. When Cash enlisted in the Air Force, he was not permitted to use initials as a first name, so he changed it to John R. Cash. In 1955, when signing with Sun Records, he started using the name Johnny Cash.

Just like Harry S Truman "Since the S did not stand for a name, Harry didn't use a period after it for most of his life."

https://www.trumanlittlewhitehouse.com/key-west/president-tr...

Similarly Oppenheimer, of the Manhattan project

He thought assuming that leading J made him seem more posh and WASPy

Interesting story, but, unfortunately, it's not true. Wiki gives his full name as "Julius Robert Oppenheimer." Julius was apparently his father's name as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer

"E" can also be a surname or given name in Chinese. It's pronounced like "uh" in English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(surname) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cai_E

Interesting, now that you mention it I can't think of any French names that are 2 letters long. But in English we have tons, "Ed Mo" is a perfectly plausible name.

There's a few french names that are 2 letters long and even some only one letter long.[1] ;-)

[1] http://www.geopatronyme.com/cdip/lettresnoms/lettres1-3.html

I clicked on some of them, and most have fewer than 20 recorded instances in over 100 years. I guess it happens sometimes, but it's really not comparable to the prevalence of names like Ed, Jo, Bo etc (which aren't always contractions). The most common two letter name in France is probably something like Li or Ng.

Edit: Funny observation - when you use the system that's linked to try and look up the public records, it won't even let you search for names with less than two letters.

The French minister for digital affairs is, funnily enough, named Cédric O

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9dric_O

I'm a friend (and former colleague) of the repo author.

That's exactly some of the cases we had to deal with some legacy invoicing systems (of which Kevin was not responsible, but I was ;))