Nicknames

E nglish, unlike French, has no distinctive terms to distinguish between sobriquets and surnoms , a drawback which has its advantages. Nickname , from eke-name ‘an additional name’, is an elastic term which is used here for a name or description which is added to or substituted for the proper name of a person. It does not include pet-names or diminutives of personal-names and is applicable equally to those descriptions which refer only to a particular person and to those which have become family names. Most of our earliest examples were personal and died with the man: Edricus Cecus ‘the blind’ (1066 DB), the nickname of Edricus de Laxefelde, Robert Nagod ‘no good’, ‘good for nothing’ (Hy I ELPN), with numerous other examples in the following two or three centuries.