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Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
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What is the origin of your username/nickname?

This has probably been asked before but I wanted to add another layer/an alternative.

So, I ask, where did your username/pseudonym/nickname originate from? What's the meaning behind it?

Or alternatively, which is the most creative/interesting nickname origin you have come across?

271 comments

  • Resol - can mean a number of different things. It's the first 5 letters of the word "resolution". It's also the word "loser" spelled backwards. It's two notes on a keyboard (D and G in Anglo-Saxon music notation). And it just looks and sounds cool in my opinion.

    van - the Dutch word meaning "of" or "from". Note that I am not referring to actual vans (the German equivalent being "von", which also appears in a lot of names). Also I prefer spelling that word completely in lowercase.

    Lemmy - isn't it obvious? It's this wonderful website.

    Put them together, and you get "Resol van Lemmy". It sounds pretty nice, don't you think? Especially since I really hate my real name.

  • CB radio user names are called handles. One of my nicknames is The Vandal. I think Subterranean Homesick Blues is one of Dylan's best. Violà.

  • My husband’s nickname for me. I was born in the holler in Appalachia and am a woodsy pixie. It stuck and is now my trail name.

  • Tenno, wake up. It's time to put on the silly norg fish mask from cetus and make it look good.

  • School nickname

    In Portuguese "zero hora" is the midnight shift, people started making jokes when I slept in class and the name got stuck.

  • The way I drove and the papers I used for rolling joints back when I was a teenager

  • I was playing some crappy F2P MMO (Perfect World, maybe?) and I made a warrior of some werewolf race. Just played with random wolf-related combinations and settled on this. Quit after two days and the username carried on for probably 15 years now.

    I don't even really know all that much about Stalin. I just pulled it out of my ass.

  • I used to play GH3 on PS2 a lot and i played boss battles quite frequently

    One time, in another game called Soldat, when a clan was recruiting they told me to change my old nickname since it was bizarre (i was 15 yo). I was looking for inspiration and quickly came up with Lou (final boss in GH3), added ` so i would be recognised easily while also not impersonating anyone unintentionally.

    Few months passed by and i saw someone on some Soldat-related IRC channel chilling with my nickname and that person wasn't actually impersonating me (he/she used that nickname for much longer time than me since "Lou" is actually a first name which for me, as a native polish speaker, wasn't that obvious at the time) so that huge coincidence made me come up with an addition to my nickname - 2nd boss in GH3, famous guitarist - Slash. In the end i started using LouSlash`

    As time passed by, in some places/websites/games i couldn't use ` so i drop it occasionally.

  • M is the letter my real name starts with, and 137 has been my favourite number since I was a kid, and I still think is the coolest number (has nothing to do with 1337, as some people have previously thought).

  • Just a greeting used in an RPG I really liked. As pretty much the only formal greeting in its setting, it seemed very overused, so a friend and I started using it in our friend group as a meme, and I decided that it actually goes pretty hard as a username.

  • It's from my favourite Shakespeare play, Much Ado About Nothing.

    Beatrice (on the subject of getting married):

    Would it not grieve a woman to be overmaster’d with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl?

    It doesn't make that much sense as a username for me, because the piece of valiant dust would be the husband and I'm a woman. But I thought it sounded nice.

271 comments