An awfully long time ago, an informal or humorous name used in place of a person’s given name was said to be that person’s ekename. The old word eke means “extra” or “additional,” and it survives today in phrases such as “to eke out a living.” Error or mishearing is a common source of new English words, and ekename gives us a good example of this strange-but-true process at work.
Note: Creating a new word by chopping off the initial letter or syllable of an existing word is called aphaeresis (which means “to take away”). This not-as-uncommon-as-you-might-think process was the source of words such as mend (a shortening of amend), spy (from espy), cute (from acute), and squire (from esquire).
Whenever someone would say the phrase “an ekename,” there was always a good chance that some listener (who had never heard the word before) would think the person was actually saying “a nekename.” In this case, that mistake happened often enough that ekename turned into nekename, which then turned into our word nickname.