The hidden logic of nicknames
What “Rob” and “Andy” teach us about language
It is a crisp September morning. The slight chill in the air does nothing to dampen little Robert’s excitement as he turns the corner from his house. He holds his mother’s hand as they cross the big road. It’s a bit scary, but what’s on the other side of the street is worth it: school.
Little Robert is going to school today. Big school! Just like the big kids!
When they reach the school door, Robert’s mother kisses him goodbye, and he strides in with his little backpack.
“My name is Robert!” he says proudly to the teacher as she opens the door for him.
“Good morning, Robert! Welcome to your first day of school,” she replies.
As Robert strides down the hall in his brand new uniform, he greets the people he meets in the same way, with a hearty “My name is Robert!”
Eventually, he finds a gaggle of other little boys and girls standing around. He walks up to them and says the same thing he’s said to everyone else: “My name is Robert!”
This time, he gets something different in reply.
“Hi Rob!” says one girl.
Little Robert is puzzled. His name is Robert. Not Rob.
“But my name is Robert,” he says.
“Rob means Robert,” says his new friend, “It’s just shorter.”
“Oh,” says Robert. “I see. What’s your name?”
“Elizabeth,” she says. “Or Liz for short!”
Robert thinks for a minute. “But if you wanted to make it really short, we should just call you Li, shouldn’t we? And I could be Ro!”
Liz looks at Robert with a strange expression.
“No,” she says, “that would be weird. You’re weird, Robert.”
And she walks away, warning the others not to talk to the weird boy named Robert.
It’s going to be a tough year.
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Nicknames are weird
Little Liz is right. Robert is weird. But so are the rules of forming nicknames in English.
Nicknames are often explained as making things quicker to say. But many nicknames are just as long as the names they “shorten,” whether you measure them in letters or syllables. Instead, the function of nicknames is more often to express affection than simply to say something quickly.
But more interesting than the function of nicknames — or hypocoristics, as they’re known in linguistics — are the precise details of how they’re formed from base forms, that is, the full form of the name.
And, just to be clear, the interesting nicknames, from a linguistic point of view, are the ones widely used for particular base forms, like Liz for Elizabeth and Rob for Robert, rather than those given to individuals for idiosyncratic reasons, such as how Bruce Springsteen is called The Boss. To understand the reason people get these very personal nicknames, you’ll have to consult their biographer rather than a linguist.
And then there are certain nicknames which are only very distantly related to their base forms: think Jack for James. While these nicknames are often related historically to their base forms,1 as far as we’re concerned today, the relationship is arbitrary. You just have to learn that Jack can be used as a short form for James as part of your education about the world. These arbitrary nicknames aren’t as interesting, linguistically speaking, as the ones which derive more regularly from their base forms.
The reason we’re interested in more regular hypocoristics, like David → Dave, is that they appear to be formed using a linguistic rule. As our young friend Robert learned to his disadvantage, you can’t just truncate a person’s name wherever you want and call the result a nickname.
In fact, there’s usually only one place to chop. Here are some examples:
Robert → Rob2
David → Dave
William → Will
Susan → Sue
Natalie → Nat
Bertrand → Bert
Alan → Al
Edward → Ed
Eleanor → Elle
Sebastian → Seb
Sometimes there are names with multiple possibilities:
Alexander → Al, Alex, Xander
Elizabeth → Liz, Lizzie, Beth
Christopher → Chris, Topher
Natasha → Nat, Tash, Tasha
And then there are the many, many nicknames which take a truncated form of a name and add a suffix. In Modern English, the most common of these is the diminutive suffix -y (also spelled -ey or -ie),3 but there are others.4 For example:
Robert → Robbie
Will → Willy
Bertrand → Bertie
Eleanor → Ellie
Susan → Suzie
Edward → Eddie
Andrew → Andy
Elizabeth → Lizzie
Natasha → Tashy
I’m sure you could come up with plenty of examples of your own.
What’s interesting about these suffixed forms is that they seem to attach to the same truncated version of the name used as a nickname unto itself.5
What’s even more interesting is how other clippings of the name just don’t seem to work:
❌ William → Willia, Wi
❌ Robert → Rober, Ro
❌ Edward → Edwar, Edw
That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?
As it turns out, there’s a perfectly logical linguistic explanation.
Syllables are not any less weird
If your early education was anything like mine, it probably involved a phase where you were taught to count syllables by clapping along as you said various words.
This syllable-counting game is an interesting exercise because it doesn’t so much give children a new piece of knowledge as give a name to something they already knew, but had probably never thought about.
In fact, we all have tacit knowledge of what syllables are and how to break words into syllables, even if we don’t know the technical language to describe it.
Everything from children’s clapping games (a 👏 sai- 👋 lor 👏 went 👋 to 👏 sea 🫡 sea 🫡 sea 🫡) to our ability to compose songs and poetry according to particular metres depends on it.
What’s particularly strange about syllables is that, if you look purely at the acoustic characteristics of speech, you can’t actually find consistent signals that correlate to our intuitive idea of where syllables are divided. And believe me, linguists have tried everything over the decades.
In other words, the syllable is something abstract that exists within the minds of the speakers of the language and controls many aspects of the language’s grammar.
For example, English adjectives (e.g. big) build their comparative (e.g. bigger) and superlative (e.g. biggest) forms differently depending on how many syllables the adjective has: one-syllable adjectives add the suffixes -er and -est to the end, while most adjectives of two or more syllables need to add separate words more and most: interesting → more interesting, most interesting.6
Another place where the syllable exerts its influence is in the formation of hypocoristics. Let’s review the truncated forms we were discussing earlier:
Robert → Rob
David → Dave
William → Will
Susan → Sue
Bertrand → Bert
Alan → Al
Edward → Ed
Eleanor → Elle
Sebastian → Seb
From these examples, we can easily derive rule number one for the formation of hypocoristics: truncate the name to a single syllable.
For some names, we will add a diminutive suffix -y, as we saw earlier:
Robert → Robbie
Will → Willy
Bertrand → Bertie
Eleanor → Ellie
Susan → Suzie
Edward → Eddie
Andrew → Andy
Elizabeth → Lizzie
Natasha → Tashy
But there’s something more complicated going on here: if we break down these names into syllables, we find that the boundaries are not always where we’d expect them to be, given the nickname.
For example, David has two syllables, which we break down as Da-vid rather than Dave-id, despite the nickname Dave. Similarly, Andrew breaks down into the syllables An-drew, which is not what we might expect given that it is clipped to And- (not An-) before it has its -y ending added.
Let’s refine our theory.
Why it’s Andy, not Andry
The new question: Why does David shorten to Dave and Andrew shorten to And- (before -y is suffixed), rather than to their first syllables Da- and An-?
The reason for this is that English hypocoristics are actually not just truncations to the first syllable of the name. Instead, they often consist of a single new syllable, one which doesn’t directly correspond to any syllable present in the original name.
This syllable is filled with as much material from the base form as can possibly fit into an English syllable. So, for David, we grab the v from the start of the next syllable as well because Dave is a perfectly legitimate syllable in English (just like gave or save). So even though Da- is a valid syllable (in fact, it’s a word unto itself when we spell it like day), Dave is the better nickname because it preserves more of the base form.
The same is true for Andrew: An- is a valid syllable, but so is And-. So And- is preferred over An- because it preserves more material from the base form, even though the d in Andrew is over in the next syllable. If we try to be a bit greedier, and take the r from -drew as well, we’ve gone too far: Andr- is not a valid English syllable. This is why Andy is the nickname of Andrew, rather than Anny or Andry.
Funnily enough, Annie (spelled with an -ie) is a valid nickname, just not for Andrew. It’s a nickname for Anne or Anna (or similar). Here, the maximum amount of material you can steal to create a new syllable is Ann-. Since there aren’t any other consonants following Ann-, Annie it is!
You can think of the nickname-forming process as an algorithm: go through the original name, starting at the start, and take sounds until you’ve made the maximum valid syllable that the English language can handle.
This also explains why Robert can’t have the nickname Ro,7 and William can never be Wi. You need to keep going and take the b from -bert and the l from -lliam — no more, and no less. Hence Rob and Will.
Now, not all nicknames fit this theory.8 But you should think of these rules not so much as an exhaustive account of all English nicknames, more as an explanation of a particularly common pattern — a pattern, by the way, that extends beyond people’s nicknames. When people truncate liberal to lib or pregnant to pregg-ers, they’re using the same set of rules that turn Robert to Rob and Andrew to Andy.
So, as it turns out, there’s a lot of linguistics hiding in the simple act of making a nickname. The next time you hear one of these truncations, see if you can spot the algorithm in action. In fact, there are some aspects of the process that I didn’t get to in this article.
So here’s some homework for you: what happens when the base form isn’t stressed on the first syllable, as we saw earlier with Elizabeth? Drop your analysis of what’s going on there in the comments.
For example, Jack is more properly a hypocoristic (pet name) form of Jacob. But, because the names James and Jacob both come from a single Latin name Iacobus, which had a spoken variant Iacomus with an m sound, Jack is used as a hypocoristic for both James and Jacob. This is why we give the name Jacobites to the supporters of the exiled King James II of England (and VII of Scotland!).
There’s also Bob for Robert and Bill for William. Notice, however, that these chop the name in the same place as Rob and Will. Swapping out the first consonant in a nickname was a common practice in the Middle Ages. See Dick for Richard. It’s for this reason that Peg is, bizarrely, a nickname for Margaret.
The diminutive suffix -y also appears outside of nicknames, e.g. doggy, drinky, walky.
Other suffixes used in English hypocoristics include -o, -er, -ers, -ster,.. I’ve also heard -erino (if you’re not into the whole brevity thing), -inator, -meister, and -meister general used as hypocoristic suffixes, usually in one-off contexts. But interestingly, these all seem to attach to the same truncated form as -y attaches to.
Susan → Sue or Suzie. Apparently Suze also exists, although I’ve never heard it. But Suie is right out.
There are some two-syllable adjectives which work more like one-syllable adjectives as well: happy → happier, happiest. An interesting question is: why? Perhaps we’ll talk about that some other time…
In theory, you could lengthen Ro- to sound like Roe and get a valid nickname. Has anyone done this? But Ro with the vowel as it sounds in Robert won’t work. Forms like Ro- and Wi-, at least with the vowels pronounced as they are in the base forms Robert and William, aren’t able to stand on their own as independent words in English. This is because the vowels are too short: English requires words of a single syllable to end either in a consonant (bad), or a long vowel/diphthong (bay).
Regarding Jack, from all the research that I have done on this, it's actually a hypocoristic form of John. In Old and Middle English, John had a pet form, "Jankin" ("-kin", while no longer productive, is still found in some words, such as "napkin", "pumpkin", etc.); later, the nasals fell off, leaving us with "Jack". On the other hand, the hypocoristic form of Jacob is "Jake".
Sometimes, Jack, due to phonetic similarity, is used as a translation of French "Jacques", even though it is more properly translated as James/Jacob.
If you have different information, please let me know. I have a vested interest in this, due to my own first name.
Wondering how we get Libby for Elizabeth and Dick for Richard. My name, Jennifer, was uber-popular in America in the 80s, so every school class contained multiple Jennifers, and each needed a different nickname or moniker to distinguish them. As a child, I was the “Jenny” in the class. Today in my university department, my colleague is “Jen,” while I am “Jennifer” to separate us. But in college my nickname was more unusual: “Iffer.”