Username

How to spell username

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce username

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does username mean?

1. nounThe unique name a person uses to identify themselves when logging in to a computer system, website, or online account.

Username in a sentence

• The login screen asked for both a username and a password.

• She could not remember the username she had chosen for the banking portal.

Where does username come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern English compound formed by joining 'user' and 'name', both of which are old, native words. 'Name' descends from Old English 'nama', a Germanic root meaning the word by which a person or thing is known, and it has close cousins in German 'Name' and Latin 'nomen'. 'User' is built from the verb 'use', which English took from Old French 'user' in the 1300s, ultimately from Latin 'usus', the past participle of 'uti', meaning 'to make use of'; adding the agent suffix '-er' produces 'one who uses'. The combined term 'username' emerged in the computing world of the 1960s and 1970s, when shared mainframes and timesharing systems needed a short label to identify each account holder. It became an everyday word with the spread of email and the internet in the 1990s. Because it is simply two familiar words pushed together with no space, the only real spelling question is whether to write it as one word, which is now the settled convention.

How the word is built

• user (one who uses, from use
• -er agent suffix)
• name (an identifying word)