Have you ever known someone for years before learning their real name?  Maybe they were introduced to you as Red or Junior.  Then one day, you go to their wedding or graduation and hear their name announced as Robert.  The name you have been calling him for years was a nickname.  But who is this Nick, and why does he have so many names?

Nicknames are abundant throughout history and across cultures.  They can be given to objects, events, and places as well as to people.  We seem to love renaming things.  Giving people, places, and things new names can promote a sense of familiarity and belonging to a group.  They are not always a shortening of the original name.  Nicknames can be a play on words or sounds or descriptive of personality or physical characteristics.  They can also be honorific or insulting.

You might think “nickname” has something to do with people shortening Nicolas to Nick, but it actually comes from the Middle English word “eke,” meaning “to lengthen or increase.”  It is the same word that gives us the phrase “to eke out.”  So, an “eke name” was an additional name.  The phrase “eke name” began to appear in English in the 14th century.  Over time, this changed to “nekename” through a process known as rebracketing.  Spoken quickly, people heard “an ekename” as “a nekename.” Through mispronunciations and variations in spelling, “nekename” evolved into our modern-day “nickname.”

The same process can be observed in the shifting of “an other” to “another” or “a napron” to “an apron.”

It can be tempting to think of language as fixed and governed by unchanging rules.  Nickname, both in the origin of the word and what they describe, remind us that language is something that is always changing.  The correct word, pronunciation, and spelling may be entirely different a few generations from now.

Crystal Kelly is a feature writer for Bizarre Bytes with those unusual facts that you only need to know for Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy, or to stump your in-laws.

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