only for you, uknjx2, aka jim hensen superstar . . . Why do we call informal names "nicknames?" As I'm sure you have already guessed, the etymological source for this modern word is the Old English word, "eke," meaning besides or in addition to. I know you can fill in the rest, but just for the record . . . In the Middle Ages an eke name was a name in addition to your formal name. Most people did not have last names and in any village there might be more than one person with the same name -- say, William. To avoid confusion, there would be William the blacksmith, William the tanner, etc. Those were their eke or additional names, a concept we've adopted for informally referring to any William as Bill – his additional name. Now what if I wrote and pronounced "an eke name" as "a neke name?" This linguistic looseness is called noncing. We arrived at the word "nickname" because over the years the words got slightly rearranged -- a nodd phenome non, to be sure. ------------------ Life is too short to be small.