By K. Greaves

What is your name?
Answer; n or m (n = name; m = nn = names)
Who gave you this name?
Answer; My godfathers and godmothers in my baptism.

Thus begins the Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, and the baptismal names referred to are those usually known as Christian names. But to distinguish us from other people who have the same Christian name we have an additional name – a surname, the prefix ‘sur-’ meaning ‘extra’, as in surcharge and surtax, coming fairly obviously from the French. But we have, rather less obviously, an interesting English equivalent.

Anyone who has read any Chaucer will be familiar with the Middle English word ’eke’ or ‘eek’ meaning ‘also’. It was in common use five hundred years ago, and we still use a form of it in the phrase ’to eke out’, meaning to try to make something in short supply, such as money, go further – to get extra, additional use from it. Attached to the word ‘name’ it gave ‘eke-name’, exactly equivalent to ‘surname’; and, in the course of those three or four centuries after the Norman conquest when the developing English language was widely spoken but rarely written down, ’an eke- name’ became ‘a neke-name’ or ‘nickname’.

It is one of the strengths of the English language that it is rich in pairs of words like these which, while having essentially the same meaning, have different forms reflecting different origins and have come, through usage, to acquire slightly different functions. Many surnames must originally have been nicknames in the modern sense of the word – names like Redhead, Crookshank, etc – but today we differentiate between a surname and a nickname, and the language is the richer for it.

The shift of the letter ’n’ from the article to the noun – ‘an eke-name’ to ‘a neke-name’ – is by no means exceptional. There is a small creature which, in some rural areas, is still known as an eft or, more anciently, an evvet. By some confusion of ’w’ and ‘w’ the ewet (or eft) came to be called an ewt, and hence what used to be called an eft is now called a newt.

The ‘n’ can also move in the opposite direction, when the article ‘a’ takes unto itself the initial ‘n’ from the noun that follows. The modern word ‘apron’ was originally ‘napron’ , a word related to nap and napkin and napery. And ‘an adder’ was originally ‘a nadr’, thus giving the lie to the story of the little snakes in the Garden of Eden who complained that they had been sent into the world to multiply and they couldn’t because they were adders.

Published in Mourholme Magazines Issue 12 Autumn 1986