For her patients it would have been a mouthful. Not to mention the difficulties she would have faced introducing herself at a party. Which is why Germany's highest court today ruled that a dentist from Munich is forbidden from calling herself Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim-Kunz-Hallstein.

The woman wanted to combine her own name, Thalheim, with the double-barrelled name of her lawyer husband, Hans Peter Kunz-Hallstein, to create a triple-barrelled moniker. The dentist argued that failure to allow her to do so would infringe her personal rights.

But the constitutional court ruled by five judges to three against her, referring to a 1993 law introduced to curb a growing trend in the creation of "name chains", or combinations of more than two surnames.

The court said a triple-barrelled name considerably "lessened the impact of a name to do what it was supposed to do, namely 'to identify'". They said they feared ruling in Thalheim's favour would have set a dangerous precedent.

Following the defeat, which ends a lengthy legal battle, Thalheim's lawyer said she was likely to keep her existing surname.

Her husband had rejected the idea of dropping part of his surname and amalgamating the remaining part with his wife's, arguing that his legal practice had carried the name Kunz-Hallstein for years and any change could damage his business.The case highlighted the complicated and strictly regulated world of German name-giving. Under German law there is a specific list of approved names from which parents must choose when naming their offspring. Any diversions from the list have to be approved by authorities.

Thalheim's lawyer argued there was little chance that allowing the name Thalheim-Kunz-Hallstein would set a precedent because, being unwieldy, triple-barrelled names were seldom desired.

According to German law, married couples have the choice of taking one of the existing surnames, keeping existing names, or combining two names as long as they are linked by a hyphen.

Germany's leading opinion pollster was famous for defying the rules by combining hers and her husband's names so that she became Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann-Maier-Leibnitz. But she dropped the last two names after the death of her husband Heinz in 2000.