A name that acquired a consonant
The original word was ekename, built from eke, meaning “also” or “additional,” and name.” An ekename was an extra name: a label used alongside a person’s ordinary one. But in speech, the word often followed the article an*—as in “an ekename.”
When the word boundary moved
The sounds at the boundary between an and ekename could be heard as belonging to different words. Listeners began parsing “an ekename” as “a nekename,” shifting the n from the article into the name. Linguists call this kind of mistaken redivision rebracketing: the sounds stay nearly the same, but the perceived boundary changes.
Once nekename was understood as the word, its opening n became part of its spelling and pronunciation. The article still supplied the same sound in the phrase, but the word had changed. That small shift left English with nickname—and with a reminder that even familiar words can carry traces of how people once grouped sounds in everyday speech.
