I think everybody (at least in the US) has heard of “John Doe”, the fictional name used in legal cases as a substitute for a real name that’s being kept secret. But “John Doe” is a lot older than you might think. In English law it goes back to at least the 1500s. A rulebook published in 1593 explained how to conduct court proceedings, and mentioned Mr. Doe: “After the stile of the Court entered, you shall cause the Bayliffe to crie once Oyes, and then call the Iurors. Examp. Iohn Doe, Richard Roe, Iohn Den, Richard Fen, [etc].”
“Richard Roe” is mentioned too, and that name is also still used as a placeholder. Both of them seem to have something to do with wildlife — both a “doe” and a “roe” are deer — but nobody knows whether that has any significance. It probably doesn’t; note that all the invented surnames in the 1593 list are three letters long. That makes them easy to pronounce, easy to remember, and probably most importantly, easy to write. They kept extensive court records back in those days too, but they all had to be written out by hand.
That was no longer a problem when newspapers in the US came up with “John Q. Public” and “John Q. Citizen” to mean “the man in the street” — in other words, as a way to say “we think most people have this opinion.” There were typewriters by the 1920s, when those two fictional names appeared. As far as I know, nobody ever explained what the Q stood for.
“John Stiles” and “Richard Miles” are also placeholder names, but used much less often. For one thing, you need a list or names long enough to get past John Doe and Richard Roe (which are always the first ones used), and for another, both “Stiles” and “Miles” are not uncommon surnames, so there are certainly actual people named John Stiles and Richard Miles. In fact, there’s a John Stiles with his own Wikipedia page (former professional soccer player) — and SIX such pages dedicated to people named “Richard Miles.” One of the “Richard Miles” entries, though, is there because it’s not a real name. “Richard Miles” was the pen name used by Gerald Richard Perreau-Saussine, a writer and actor who also used “Peter Miles” as his stage name.
It’s so useful to have fictional names available to use as generic placeholders that there will probably be more to come. For instance, we might need some names suggesting greater diversity, like “Arista Pablo,” “Miško Azaziah,” or “Bikä Djangirova.” Now that we have keyboards with copy and paste commands, we don’t have to worry about keeping the names brief, of course, and in fact those three were automatically generated. At any rate, as time goes on, John Q. Public is probably going to see more variety than John Doe and Richard Roe.
