You know what a nickname is, of course – a substitute for someone or something’s proper name. But have you ever wondered who Nick is?
As it’s Christmas, it would be great if the ‘nick’ was St Nick. But, sadly, it turns out there’s no Nick in nickname. It’s a very old word, going all the way back to the early 1300s. And it looked a bit different then, as it was spelled ‘ekename’. This literally means ‘additional name’ from the Old English word ‘eac’, which comes from ‘eacian’ – to increase. So how did it become ‘nickname’? This is down to a process called rebracketing (also resegmentation or metanalysis if you want to get really technical), which is a fancy-dancy way of saying that the ‘n’ of the ‘an’ got moved to the beginning of the noun. So it went from [an][ekename] to [a][nekename], which eventually morphed into ‘nickname’.
This specific type of rebracketing is called ‘false splitting’. Other words that have lost an ‘n’ because of false splitting include:
a napron ⇾ an apron (the thing you wear when you’re cooking)
a naddere ⇾ an adder (snake)
a noumpere ⇾ an umpire (the tennis people).
Another type of rebracketing is when words become split in a way that’s different from how they were built. If you just said ‘huh’, here are some examples which will hopefully help:
hamburger – hamburgers are called hamburgers because they come from Hamburg i.e. [Hamburg][er]. But because ham is a food, at some point we decided they were made from ham (even though they’re not), and created a new word, ‘burger’. Then we attached that to lots of other foodstuffs (cheeseburger, veggieburger, etc). Ooh, I’m hungry now
helicopter – this is made up of ‘helico’, from the Greek word ‘helix’ meaning ‘spiral’, and ‘pter’ from ‘pterón’ which means ‘wing’. So it’s actually [helico][pter]. Presumably because ‘pter’ is quite hard to pronouce, we’ve rebracketed it as [heli][copter] and use both of these as parts of other words (helipad and gyrocopter being the only two I can think of at the moment)
alcoholic – this is actually made up of [alcohol] and [ic], with alcohol being, well, alcohol, and the suffix ‘ic’ meaning ‘relating to’. We’ve rebracketed this as [alco][holic] and added the [holic] bit to anything vaguely addictive (shopaholic, workaholic, etc.).
Well, that was a lot of technical gubbins, wasn’t it? Let’s finish up with some awesome historical nicknames.
Henry the Impotent doing a medieval finger gun
Viscount Goderich, AKA The Blubberer: Goderich (1782–1859) holds the dubious honour of being the briefest-serving British prime minister ever (who didn’t die in office) at only 144 days. He got his nickname from crying in the House of Commons about people who died in riots against the Corn Laws (which I think makes him sound like quite a nice bloke).
Ragnar Hairy Pants: This one’s slightly cheeky as Ragnar might not have been a real person, although he does turn up in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which is apparently pretty reliable. I think his nickname’s fairly self-explanatory (he had hairy trousers). His son also had an awesome nickname – Ivar the Boneless – although no-one knows for sure where that came from.
Charles XIV of Sweden, AKA Sergeant Pretty Legs: He was king of Sweden and Norway from 1818 until he died in 1844, and he had good legs. Nuff said.
Honourable mentions to: Constantine the Dung-Named (Byzantine emperor from 741 to 775); John The Babymaker (born in 1458 and ruled Cleves – where ‘Anne of’ came from presumably, apparently fathering 63, yep, 63 illegitimate children); and Henry the Impotent (King of Castile from 1454 to 1474, who failed to consummate his 13-year marriage to his cousin, although didn’t have trouble doing it with anyone else apparently).