Nickname

 
December 6 is the feast day of St. Nicholas, the original Santa Claus. Is St. Nick the origin of “nickname”? No, but “nickname” has an interesting story. It was originally an “eke-name”, from the Anglo-Saxon word eke (also), which gradually died out of the language, so people no longer understood that an “eke-name” was an “also-name”. They began to think that “an eke-name” was “a neke-name”, and so we ended up with “nickname”.