Name at birth is the name given to a child by his or her parents, according to cultural norm of the society, as well as legal requirements.

Where births are required to be officially registered, the name entered onto a births register or birth certificate may by that fact alone become a legal name.^[1] The assumption in the Western world is often that the name from birth, or perhaps from baptism, persists to adulthood in the normal course of affairs. Some possible changes concern middle names, uses of diminutive forms, adoption, choice of surname as parents divorce or were not married. Matters are very different in some other cultures, where a name at birth is only a childhood name rather than the default choice for later life.

The French and English-adopted terms née and né (/ˈneɪ/; French: [ˈne], from French né[e] 'born') are used to indicate the name at birth. The term née having feminine grammatical gender, can be applied to a woman's surname at birth that has been replaced or changed (women might prefer to have their marital names fixed to their pre-marital names), most often (in English-speaking cultures) at marriage.^[2] The masculine form né, though uncommon, can likewise be applied in English or French to men's family names changed for any reason.^[3] (The accent marks are sometimes omitted.)

Birth name, or now sometimes birthname, can mean name at birth, or the more elusive concept of personal name (that is, name before taking a professional name such as stage name, pen name, ring name, assumed name, alias name, nickname, or some recognised name change process^{[citation needed]} that de jure alters names). This is sometimes used for name before marriage of a woman – in cultures where a married woman's name customarily changes – by those who find maiden name to be an old-fashioned usage with the wrong connotations. It is also applied to mean the family name of the mother of a child adopted at birth, and is thus likely to be used with more flexibility than the loan-words née and né, accepting it even when the name being referred to was acquired by adoption (at or long after birth), or made in connection with a change of nationality, or changed in any of the variety of other, rarer circumstances.