How to come up with a good nickname?
Online, a nickname is the name people know you by in a game, a chat or a social network — chosen by you, and usually not the one in your passport. Picking one sounds trivial until every obvious option turns out to be taken. The way out is always the same: pick a starting point, build several candidates, and check that they are readable and free.
Ways to build a nickname
Good nicknames rarely come from staring at an empty field. They come from a starting point and a technique.
- Join two words. An adjective and a noun, or two nouns, give a name that reads at a glance: SilentFalcon, PixelNinja. It is the simplest place to start.
- Start from something of yours: a hobby, a profession, a favourite animal, character or place — anything you will not be embarrassed by in five years. Your first name works too, as part of a longer name: AlexStorm.
- Change a word. Reverse it, shorten it, double a letter, stretch a vowel (Aleex), or add a short prefix or suffix: ItsAlex, AlexGG.
- Borrow from another language. Take a word you like for its meaning and its sound, and check what else it means, how it is pronounced and what it may be associated with.
- Invent a word. Combining ordinary syllables gives a name with an unusual sound, such as Rabol or Juwet. Even a word you made up may already be in use, or mean something in another language, so check it like any other.
- Use leet sparingly. Swapping a letter for a digit that looks like it (e→3, o→0) can rescue a name that is taken, but every swap makes the name harder to read, so keep it to one or two.
From an idea to a name: an example
Suppose you like space and animals. Write down a few words for each: orbit, comet, lunar; fox, otter, raven. Join them in pairs — OrbitOtter, CometFox, LunarRaven — and say each one aloud. Drop the ones that are awkward to pronounce or to spell, check the rest against the length limit of the platform, and try your favourite in its sign-up form. If it is taken, change one half rather than adding digits: CometFox becomes CometFinch. These names are illustrations only; nobody has checked whether they are free.
What to check before you register it
- Say it aloud. If a friend struggles to spell it after hearing it, look for a simpler version.
- Check the length and the characters. Every platform has its own limits — an Xbox gamertag stops at 12 characters, a Minecraft Java name at 16 — so a short name made of Latin letters and digits travels furthest.
- Look for characters that look alike. The letters l and I and the digit 1, or the letter O and the digit 0, make a name hard to type from memory.
- Do not mix look-alike letters from different alphabets. A Latin a and a Cyrillic а look the same but are different characters, and a name that mixes them is easy to mistype. Which alphabets are allowed depends on the platform, and on whether you are choosing a username or a display name.
- Search for it. See who else uses the name, and what it means in other languages and in slang.
- Keep two or three alternatives. Only the platform itself can tell you whether a name is free, usually right in its sign-up or rename form.
If the name is taken
- Replace one of the words with a close one.
- Add a short word that fits the theme, at the start or at the end.
- Swap the order of the words, if the result still sounds natural.
- Use a separator the platform allows, such as an underscore, if the name stays readable.
- Do not add your year of birth or a long tail of digits.
Personal details to leave out
A nickname is public. Unless you want the account to be linked to your life offline, leave out what identifies you: your full name, your school or employer, your town, and above all your year of birth. Avoid anything offensive, even as a joke: platforms rename or ban such accounts, and a name that seemed funny at fifteen follows you for years. And think about where you reuse it. The same rare nickname on every service lets anyone connect your accounts, so reuse a nickname where you want to be recognized, and use different names for the accounts you want to keep separate.
Using a generator
Our nickname generator automates several of these techniques. From words joins two words on the theme you pick in Theme; Random letters invents pronounceable words of the length you set; From your word builds variations around your own name or word, and what you type stays in your browser.
Platform builds the names to the format of Minecraft, Roblox, Discord, Xbox and other platforms and marks the ones that fit. The mark is a format check only: it does not mean that the name is free or that the platform will accept it. Press Generate a few times, star the candidates you like so that they collect in Favourites, and choose from the shortlist rather than from the first batch. Whether a name is free, whether it has unwanted meanings or associations, and whether it suits the community you are joining are still yours to check.
Nickname, username, display name
These terms are related, but they do not mean the same thing. A username is what an account is registered under, and it must be unique on its platform; a display name is what others see, and it often need not be unique; a gamertag is the Xbox term for a player's name. A nickname may serve as any of them.
Where the word comes from
Extra names are far older than the internet: writers and performers have long worked under names of their own choosing, as Samuel Clemens did when he published as Mark Twain. The English word itself began as a mishearing. Middle English had ekename, "an additional name" (eke meant "also"), and "an ekename" was gradually heard as "a nekename", which became "nickname". Online it turned into a necessity: citizens band radio users of the 1970s called theirs a handle, and Internet Relay Chat, created in 1988, required every user to pick a "nick" and originally limited it to nine characters.
Once the name is chosen, the account behind it needs a password that is as hard to guess as the name is easy to remember: see how to create a strong password. More about names is collected in the nickname guides.