Moniker

How to spell moniker

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce moniker

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does moniker mean?

1. nounAn informal name, nickname or label by which someone or something is known.

Moniker in a sentence

• The striker earned the moniker "the wall" for his solid defending.

• She signs her emails with a playful moniker rather than her legal name.

Where does moniker come from?

Language of origin: Other

Moniker is a piece of slang that surfaced in mid nineteenth century Britain, first recorded around the 1850s among tramps, vagrants and the wandering poor as a word for a person's name or nickname. Its exact source is genuinely uncertain, but the most widely supported idea traces it to Shelta, the secret cant of Irish Travellers, where a form like munnik or munik meant 'name'. That word may in turn echo the Irish ainm, meaning 'name', or it may have been reshaped under the influence of 'monogram' or even 'monk', since monks took new names on entering an order. Spellings wandered for decades, appearing as monicker, monniker and monaker before the single n, single k form settled as standard. Because nobody learned a tidy Latin or Greek rule for it, the spelling has to be memorised rather than reasoned out, which is exactly why the doubled letters tempt writers.

How the word is built

• moniker (single root; an unanalysable colloquial noun, possibly from Shelta munnik)