An awfully long time ago, an informal or humorous name used in place of a person’s given name was said to be that person’s ekename. The old word eke means “extra” or “additional,” and it survives today in phrases such as “to eke out a living.” Error or mishearing is a common source of new English words, and ekename gives us a good example of this strange-but-true process at work. Whenever someone would say the phrase “an ekename,” there was always a good chance that some listener (who had never heard the word before) would think the person was actually say “a nekename.” In this case, that mistake happened often enough that ekename turned into nekename, which then turned into our word nickname.