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30 Of The Funniest And Wittiest Nicknames People Ever Had, According To Folks In This Twitter Thread
Have you noticed that in recent years, nicknames for sports personalities have practically disappeared into oblivion? It's enough to go back one or two decades - and what masterpieces of wit have we seen on the court or the turf? Megatron, The Big Ticket, White Chocolate, let alone Beast Mode or Black Mamba!
Nicknames are not only disappearing from sports - they are gradually disappearing from our everyday life, from our language, making us poorer. Of course, the first name and last name are wonderful, but there are a dime a dozen of conditional John Smiths around the world, and a nickname aptly reflects some of our unique qualities or an event that once happened to us.
A nickname can be incredibly funny or cynical, ridiculous or cruel - it can replace our name, or we can try our best to get rid of it. But anyway, this is what reflects our essence, or some of its sides, whether it is light or dark.
A few days ago, there was a thread on Twitter where user @NoContextBrits asked one simple question: "What's the best nickname you've ever heard?" The thread almost instantly went viral, having collected not only around 13K likes and almost 1.5K replies, but also a real treasure trove of human wit and cynicism.
Bored Panda has put together a selection of the wittiest, most unexpected, and simply the most popular tweets from the original thread for you, so now feel free to scroll to the very end of this list, mark the best submissions and if you've heard a funny or incredibly well-aimed nickname as well, please be sure to write about it in the comments.
Image credits: NoContextBrits
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Initially, nicknames were given to people in the old days, when there were no last names, to emphasize some unique trait. In ancient societies, there were not many available names, so to distinguish people, they were given nicknames. Moreover, over time, it was the nicknames that turned into our last names - so in fact, today we still use them.
It's interesting that by last name, you can investigate exactly what specific feature one of your distant ancestors possessed. By the way, nicknames were often given in the opposite way, so a short person could well have, for example, the nickname "Long". Yes, sarcasm in the old days sometimes went off the scale.
In fact, the psychological effect of nicknames can be both positive and negative. For example, Alfred Kuranchie of Catholic University College of Ghana ten years ago specifically studied how the nicknames given to students affect their academic performance and learning process in general. "Identifying people with names other than their real names has the tendency to negatively or positively affect the bearers of fad names," claims Kuranchie.
"The respondents whose nicknames emanated from their personal features reported that they felt humiliated and embarrassed when their colleagues addressed them by such names. They intimated that because their classmates hilariously and comically scream and shout their nicknames when they contributed to discussions, whether they were right or wrong, they found it extremely difficult to participate fully in class," the researcher says.
"Similarly, those whose nicknames emanated from the mistakes they committed in class indicated that their class participation had been very minimal since then. They claimed that they abstained from class contributions in order to avoid more frosty nicknames," sums up Alfred Kuranchie.
As for sports, here nicknames often become a kind of part of the athlete's personal brand. Suffice it to recall, for example, Michael Jordan and the Air Jordan brand, created in collaboration with Nike. In any case, nicknames still remain with us - the main thing is that they are not offensive, but effective and beautiful.
Just don't cheat in his class. He will catch you in your web of lies.
I worked with a guy called “Johnny New Boots” because he showed up on the first day at that job with…a Mohawk. No, just kidding. He had new boots on.
I once worked for a construction foreman who was proud of his skill of coming up with nicknames for workers. He named one slightly chubby young new guy “G***y.” It seemed to fit. (And the kid didn’t mind.) EDIT: From the comments I found out this name is not nice. I didn’t know that. In the US it is a goofy green cartoon character made out of Play Doh or something like that. I apologize.
Poor sod, that's an insult in the UK as it's a nasty word for someone with Down Syndrome :(
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IT guy where I work was drilling a hole for a projector screen, drilled right through adjoining wall, I JUST painted (about 1 ft thick) I now call him "Happy Drillmore"
A lot of these seem to require very specific information to understand…
Note: this post originally had 39 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
One of the guys in the group was playing with his new phone while we were all discussing how nicknames were developed. The guy with the new phone was recording video of his chicken nuggets jokingly saying "Nugget Cam!". During this, one of the guys was saying how he would like to pick a cool nickname for himself. Instantly someone said, "that's not how nicknames work Nugget". (His name is Cameron, Cam for short). He is now know as 'Nugget'
I think all nicknames are meant to poke fun at the person. The best a person can hope for is that the nickname originates from or becomes a form of endearment.
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I knew someone who had a daughter named Paige. The daughter's nickname was her name and age. When she was five, her nickname was Paige Five. The next year it was Paige Six, then Paige Seven, etc.
Oh lord that would be a terrible nickname to have for a three year old girl living in UK during the 80s.
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Worked with a chap whose surname was Turvey, his knickname was Topsy.
Former England cricketer and Top Gear presenter Andrew Flintoff. He was nicknamed Freddie by the press because his surname sounds a bit like Flintstone and he struggled with his weight. He beat them at their own game though, as he has adopted the name Freddie/Fred and I'm sure a good few people don't know his real name.
When I was in the Army in 1988, there was a woman in our unit whose last name was Russian and had like ten consonants and three vowels. Not one of us could pronounce it and she said no one outside of her family could. Well in the Army we call one another by our last names. So we nicknamed her "Alphabet." It eventually got shortened to "Alphie." She LOVED IT! One day she showed us a letter from her father and it was addressed to Alphie. He loved the nickname. She oldest son, now in his late 20s, his name is Alphie.
Was talking to a homeless guy when I mentioned another homeless guy I saw a few blocks away. As I described him he said "Oh yeah. That's Bing. No one knows his real name." I said "Why Bing?" He said "You heard his thick southern drawl and how he talks all over the place about nothing that makes any sense?" I said "yeah." He said "Every time we hear him talk, we expect dueling banjos to join in. Bing-bing-bing-bing-bing-bing-bing!"
We called one of our bosses the Yeti....because only few people pretended have seen him and so for us his existence was not proven....
Over the summer, the boys in my cabin at camp (the cabins had three rooms, the girls bedroom, the boys bedroom, and the living room/kitchen) there were four boys (and two girls including me) named Bryce, Bartholomew, Ben, and Ed. The three starting with B started calling themselves something dumb like "the three Bs" and they didn't want Ed to be left out, so for the rest of the month, we called him Bed.
Guy at work was seemingly incapable of learning simple new things. You tell him something and the next day you'd have to tell him again, and the next, etc. We called him Groundhog Day, because whenever he showed up, "It's Groundhog Day!"
Same! Lady at work. We'd say, "Every day is a new day!" Because she could never remember to do simple tasks we told her every single fricken day.
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Guy in high school called me "Starla". He said looked like I had a gold star outline in my left eye. He also always said it like an insult and everyone in that class started calling me that as a way to make fun of me. Still not sure I get what's insulting about that. I never corrected him and ran into him 6 years later dropping my aunt off to her tests at a community college and he still called me that.
I've been called Martini for a couple of years. Reason was a New Years party and there was that drink nobody liked except me. Drank a lot of it and was given the Martini order after the party ... and the nickname that lasted.
Used to call my one friend Martini after the character from "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Neat"; it fit him well.
Load More Replies... I had a friend in college I mix named the pound master, because she kept bringing home stray guys from the weirdest places 😂
I call my friend Elizabeth Bethy, because when we first met I asked my friend what nicknames she liked and she told me anything except Beth and Betty.
Knew someone called Alby, as in they were always saying, I'll be there in a minute.....(with a Scottish accent)
I used to work with a guy called New Shoes. He was assigned an extra hours task at work (he would have been paid quadruple time if he could have stayed), and told the boss, in front of the entire team (this was the mistake), he couldn't do the task because he had to leave to go buy his kid new shoes. That was like 28 years ago and to this day we call him New Shoes.
There is a kid at the children's home I live at. He is so skinny, he looks like one of those plastic skeletons you hang out on halloween. His Nickname: Stick.
Not funny or witty, this is more sweet. My nickname is Carrie (actual name Caroline). It came about because my youngest niece couldn't pronounce my name when she first started talking, she just randomly called me Carrie. She called me by my actual name recently and I hated it. It felt weird. She started calling me Carrie again and when she's around everybody calls me that.
A friend of mine is known as the “haunted piano”, because he plays himself at night…
I call my sister in law pampers. After two years she asked me why. I told her. It's because she is self absorbed and full off sh!t
My boss's husband used to call me The Laconic Piranha. I'm quite proud of that
My classmate's nickname is Larva. He said something silly in grade 3 (8 years old) and it stuck.No many people in our town knew his first name, he's been Larva his whole life!
We have some deer that wander the neighborhood. One of them has a bad hind leg so we call him Sir Limpsalot when we see him come around.
We had a pelican who used to visit the wetlands next to my house, who we named Mr Beaky-long
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I worked with a couple of guys that thought it would be funny to give someone the nickname Spoons for no reason whatsoever. Just to see if it would stick. It did.
They used to call three of us MarMar because our first names began with Mar.
The cleaner at my mum's work would back comb her hair, resembling Tina Turner's in the 80s. So she was called Cleaner Turner.
Went on a trip witha group in college and there were multiple women with the name Amy so we Shortened their last names Hitchcock, Hackman and Davis to Hitch, Hack and Dave.
In the Army my best friend's nickname was Yogi when I met him. Nothing to do with the cartoon. As we started palling around, my nickname became, you guessed, "Boo Boo." We have the best nicknames for each other in the Army. This short dude had bright blond hair that stuck up everywhere. We called him "Woodstock."
I have a friend group and all of us have nicknames 😂 I'm Kirby because I eat the most out of all of us, The short kid is Pokemon, my friend who burnt her toast is Burnt Toast (so original I know..), and my old friend from elementary is blue talki because he dyed his hair bright blue in 5th grade 😂
Mine isn't as weird, but my middle name is Diane, but no one guesses this. When my friends in 7th grade were guessing, one screamed out Debrah to the whole grade. Even my principal called me debrah
My first boyfriend called me "Queeney". A couple of months in I found out it was because he had two other girlfriends too and he gave us the same nickname so that he wouldn't misspeak. I did not take it well. Nor did the other women. He moved to another city and later changed his name. It took me years to wash away the nickname though and I hated it.
I worked with a guy we all called "Spaghetti". He was always late, always breaking something, always screwing up something, always making the dumbest mistakes. He'd have not one, not ten but a book of excuses to try to justify things. If you said "You're supposed to put paper in the printer when you use it all" it'd be "I did "..."I thought I did"..." i was on my way to get some and had to go to the bathroom" "there wasn't any more paper"....if you shook your had "BS" or "NO" he'd make up another. Just like spaghetti, he'd throw everything at the wall and see what would stick. Mercifully, he got fired after 3 months when he was caught breaking into a coworker's car. "I thought I saw achild locked in there" "I thought I hear a dog whimper" "I was locking it because it had been open" "Car? WhaT CAR?" "I thought it was my car! DUH!" etc. etc. etc.....
In college 3 of us went to dinner and there was a jelly roll on the dessert table. We each took a couple of slices and one of the guys put butter on his which was quite disappointing to the other two one of which said that he had wrecked them. Of course in northern American it sounded like wrecked 'em which is an actual word. So from that day forward we that's what we called jelly roll. "I wonder if they'll have wrecked 'ems tonight?"
Three from high school - two cruel and one that sticks with me today nearly 40 years later. Scaffolding because I was thin. Casio because I didn’t have a posh calculator like all the others. Ferret that everyone from school calls me now because I had a rabbit fur jacket that my grandparents bought. My mum said there was no need to waste money on a new winter coat so when I got on the school bus Roger Daker plucked a few hairs from my coat and told everyone it was ferret fur. So Ferret I remain.
My childhood nickname was Cantaloupe, because my name is Melanie, and that got shortened to "Melon" and then I loved Cantaloupe so they started calling me that. :)
My boss once had a case with this really nasty passive aggressive attorney. One day in court, they started arguing, my boss is basically running circles around the other attorney and got him so flustered he started stuttering. Now everyone calls him "Butbut."
One of the guys in the group was playing with his new phone while we were all discussing how nicknames were developed. The guy with the new phone was recording video of his chicken nuggets jokingly saying "Nugget Cam!". During this, one of the guys was saying how he would like to pick a cool nickname for himself. Instantly someone said, "that's not how nicknames work Nugget". (His name is Cameron, Cam for short). He is now know as 'Nugget'
I think all nicknames are meant to poke fun at the person. The best a person can hope for is that the nickname originates from or becomes a form of endearment.
Load More Replies... I knew someone who had a daughter named Paige. The daughter's nickname was her name and age. When she was five, her nickname was Paige Five. The next year it was Paige Six, then Paige Seven, etc.
Oh lord that would be a terrible nickname to have for a three year old girl living in UK during the 80s.
Load More Replies... Worked with a chap whose surname was Turvey, his knickname was Topsy.
Former England cricketer and Top Gear presenter Andrew Flintoff. He was nicknamed Freddie by the press because his surname sounds a bit like Flintstone and he struggled with his weight. He beat them at their own game though, as he has adopted the name Freddie/Fred and I'm sure a good few people don't know his real name.
When I was in the Army in 1988, there was a woman in our unit whose last name was Russian and had like ten consonants and three vowels. Not one of us could pronounce it and she said no one outside of her family could. Well in the Army we call one another by our last names. So we nicknamed her "Alphabet." It eventually got shortened to "Alphie." She LOVED IT! One day she showed us a letter from her father and it was addressed to Alphie. He loved the nickname. She oldest son, now in his late 20s, his name is Alphie.
Was talking to a homeless guy when I mentioned another homeless guy I saw a few blocks away. As I described him he said "Oh yeah. That's Bing. No one knows his real name." I said "Why Bing?" He said "You heard his thick southern drawl and how he talks all over the place about nothing that makes any sense?" I said "yeah." He said "Every time we hear him talk, we expect dueling banjos to join in. Bing-bing-bing-bing-bing-bing-bing!"
We called one of our bosses the Yeti....because only few people pretended have seen him and so for us his existence was not proven....
Over the summer, the boys in my cabin at camp (the cabins had three rooms, the girls bedroom, the boys bedroom, and the living room/kitchen) there were four boys (and two girls including me) named Bryce, Bartholomew, Ben, and Ed. The three starting with B started calling themselves something dumb like "the three Bs" and they didn't want Ed to be left out, so for the rest of the month, we called him Bed.
Guy at work was seemingly incapable of learning simple new things. You tell him something and the next day you'd have to tell him again, and the next, etc. We called him Groundhog Day, because whenever he showed up, "It's Groundhog Day!"
Same! Lady at work. We'd say, "Every day is a new day!" Because she could never remember to do simple tasks we told her every single fricken day.
Load More Replies... Guy in high school called me "Starla". He said looked like I had a gold star outline in my left eye. He also always said it like an insult and everyone in that class started calling me that as a way to make fun of me. Still not sure I get what's insulting about that. I never corrected him and ran into him 6 years later dropping my aunt off to her tests at a community college and he still called me that.
I've been called Martini for a couple of years. Reason was a New Years party and there was that drink nobody liked except me. Drank a lot of it and was given the Martini order after the party ... and the nickname that lasted.
Used to call my one friend Martini after the character from "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Neat"; it fit him well.
Load More Replies... I had a friend in college I mix named the pound master, because she kept bringing home stray guys from the weirdest places 😂
I call my friend Elizabeth Bethy, because when we first met I asked my friend what nicknames she liked and she told me anything except Beth and Betty.
Knew someone called Alby, as in they were always saying, I'll be there in a minute.....(with a Scottish accent)
I used to work with a guy called New Shoes. He was assigned an extra hours task at work (he would have been paid quadruple time if he could have stayed), and told the boss, in front of the entire team (this was the mistake), he couldn't do the task because he had to leave to go buy his kid new shoes. That was like 28 years ago and to this day we call him New Shoes.
There is a kid at the children's home I live at. He is so skinny, he looks like one of those plastic skeletons you hang out on halloween. His Nickname: Stick.
Not funny or witty, this is more sweet. My nickname is Carrie (actual name Caroline). It came about because my youngest niece couldn't pronounce my name when she first started talking, she just randomly called me Carrie. She called me by my actual name recently and I hated it. It felt weird. She started calling me Carrie again and when she's around everybody calls me that.
A friend of mine is known as the “haunted piano”, because he plays himself at night…
I call my sister in law pampers. After two years she asked me why. I told her. It's because she is self absorbed and full off sh!t
My boss's husband used to call me The Laconic Piranha. I'm quite proud of that
My classmate's nickname is Larva. He said something silly in grade 3 (8 years old) and it stuck.No many people in our town knew his first name, he's been Larva his whole life!
We have some deer that wander the neighborhood. One of them has a bad hind leg so we call him Sir Limpsalot when we see him come around.
We had a pelican who used to visit the wetlands next to my house, who we named Mr Beaky-long
Load More Replies... I worked with a couple of guys that thought it would be funny to give someone the nickname Spoons for no reason whatsoever. Just to see if it would stick. It did.
They used to call three of us MarMar because our first names began with Mar.
The cleaner at my mum's work would back comb her hair, resembling Tina Turner's in the 80s. So she was called Cleaner Turner.
Went on a trip witha group in college and there were multiple women with the name Amy so we Shortened their last names Hitchcock, Hackman and Davis to Hitch, Hack and Dave.
In the Army my best friend's nickname was Yogi when I met him. Nothing to do with the cartoon. As we started palling around, my nickname became, you guessed, "Boo Boo." We have the best nicknames for each other in the Army. This short dude had bright blond hair that stuck up everywhere. We called him "Woodstock."
I have a friend group and all of us have nicknames 😂 I'm Kirby because I eat the most out of all of us, The short kid is Pokemon, my friend who burnt her toast is Burnt Toast (so original I know..), and my old friend from elementary is blue talki because he dyed his hair bright blue in 5th grade 😂
Mine isn't as weird, but my middle name is Diane, but no one guesses this. When my friends in 7th grade were guessing, one screamed out Debrah to the whole grade. Even my principal called me debrah
My first boyfriend called me "Queeney". A couple of months in I found out it was because he had two other girlfriends too and he gave us the same nickname so that he wouldn't misspeak. I did not take it well. Nor did the other women. He moved to another city and later changed his name. It took me years to wash away the nickname though and I hated it.
I worked with a guy we all called "Spaghetti". He was always late, always breaking something, always screwing up something, always making the dumbest mistakes. He'd have not one, not ten but a book of excuses to try to justify things. If you said "You're supposed to put paper in the printer when you use it all" it'd be "I did "..."I thought I did"..." i was on my way to get some and had to go to the bathroom" "there wasn't any more paper"....if you shook your had "BS" or "NO" he'd make up another. Just like spaghetti, he'd throw everything at the wall and see what would stick. Mercifully, he got fired after 3 months when he was caught breaking into a coworker's car. "I thought I saw achild locked in there" "I thought I hear a dog whimper" "I was locking it because it had been open" "Car? WhaT CAR?" "I thought it was my car! DUH!" etc. etc. etc.....
In college 3 of us went to dinner and there was a jelly roll on the dessert table. We each took a couple of slices and one of the guys put butter on his which was quite disappointing to the other two one of which said that he had wrecked them. Of course in northern American it sounded like wrecked 'em which is an actual word. So from that day forward we that's what we called jelly roll. "I wonder if they'll have wrecked 'ems tonight?"
Three from high school - two cruel and one that sticks with me today nearly 40 years later. Scaffolding because I was thin. Casio because I didn’t have a posh calculator like all the others. Ferret that everyone from school calls me now because I had a rabbit fur jacket that my grandparents bought. My mum said there was no need to waste money on a new winter coat so when I got on the school bus Roger Daker plucked a few hairs from my coat and told everyone it was ferret fur. So Ferret I remain.
My childhood nickname was Cantaloupe, because my name is Melanie, and that got shortened to "Melon" and then I loved Cantaloupe so they started calling me that. :)
My boss once had a case with this really nasty passive aggressive attorney. One day in court, they started arguing, my boss is basically running circles around the other attorney and got him so flustered he started stuttering. Now everyone calls him "Butbut."
