Where does the word nickname come from?
A nickname has no nick in it. It is an 'also-name' that quietly stole its first letter from the little word in front of it, and the same theft made Ned, Nell, and Nan.
A nickname has nothing to do with a nick. There is no notch in it, no cut, no Old Nick the devil, and no nick of time. The word began life as an ekename, an “also-name,” and the whole strange story of how it became nickname is hiding in the tiny gap between two words.
The also-name
Eke is a lost little word meaning “also, in addition, extra.” It survives, barely, in the phrase to eke out, to make something stretch further by adding to it, and it is a distant cousin of augment and auction, all from an ancient root meaning “to increase.” An ekename, then, was simply an eke-name: an extra name, added on top of the one you were christened with. Which is exactly what a nickname still is.
The letter thief
So where did that first n come from? It was stolen, one letter at a time, from the little word in front. In Middle English the phrase was an ekename. Say it aloud enough times and the ear stops hearing where the article ends and the noun begins. An ekename slurs into a nickname, and the n quietly changes sides. Linguists have a name for this kind of theft: metanalysis, the misreading of the seam between two words. The word nickname is, fittingly, a nickname for an ekename.
Robbed the other way
Nickname is unusual only in that it gained a letter. Far more often, English words lost their n to the same greedy article. A napron became an apron. The snake called a nadder became an adder. A noumpere, “the odd one, the not-equal” who settles a tie, became an umpire. A nauger, a tool for boring holes, became an auger. Even an orange was once a norange before the n wandered off. For centuries the little word an picked the pockets of the nouns behind it, lifting a letter here and handing one back there, and almost nobody noticed the exchange.
Where Ned and Nell got their N
Here is the part that closes the circle. The very same slip that produced the word nickname also produced a whole family of real nicknames. In older English you addressed someone dear as mine, the way we still say “mine own.” Mine Ed, said fondly and often, wore down to my Ned. Mine Ellen became my Nell. Mine Ann became my Nan, and mine Oliver became Noll, the “Old Noll” they called Oliver Cromwell. Every Ned, Nell, and Nan is carrying a stray n that dropped off the word for “mine,” coined by exactly the slip of the tongue that coined the word nickname itself.
So a nickname is an also-name that pickpocketed its own first letter, and in doing so it named the very trick that made it. It is the friendliest sort of mistake, the kind that quietly built half of English, and once you have heard it, you will start catching it everywhere. Not bad for a word most people assume has a nick in it somewhere.
The Monthly Lemma follows one everyday word a month all the way back to its root, then posts the whole story to your door. One word, and the world behind it.
A word like this, every month
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