Top 5 Obscure Nicknames

(FOR BOYS, MOSTLY)

5. HAL (short for Harry)

I’ll go into more detail a few names down, but ‘Harry’ is a variation of ‘Henry’, and the Normans didn’t like pronouncing the letter ‘R’ very much, and so the shortname for ‘Harry’ might have been ‘Har’ (pronouced ‘hair’), but the ‘R’ became an ‘L’ and this is where ‘Hal’ came from.

4. DICK (short for Richard)

So now we know the Normans didn’t like pronouncing the letter ‘R’, right? This means that while ‘Rick’ was a more obvious nickname for ‘Richard’, the Normans traded the ‘R’ with a ‘D’ leaving us with the flattering nickname ‘Dick’.

3. CHUCK (short for Charles)

Once I learned the root of ‘Charles’, this one wasn’t that odd, but I serve these names up to you on the premise that this knowledge is obscure at best. Apparently ‘Charles’ in Middle English is ‘Chukken’, which is where the nickname ‘Chuck’ stems from. That was easy, wasn’t it?

2. JACK (short for John)

The Norman/English have commandeered my top 5 list again. This time they went and added a term for ‘little’ onto many of their names. That suffix was ‘-kin’. So Jenkin (or little John) became corrupted into ‘Jakin’, which subsequently became truncated into ‘Jack’. Well, duh!

1. HANK (short for Henry)

Similar to ‘Jack’, there was a variation of Henry called ‘Henkin’, which also became ‘Hankin’, then truncated to ‘Hank’. Once you know about the ‘-kin’ suffix it makes some sense, but without that insight, it’s mighty arbitrary looking.