moniker

n. Slang

A personal name or nickname.

[Probably from Shelta munik, name, possibly alteration of Irish Gaelic ainm, from Old Irish.]

(MON-i-kuhr)
noun

A person's name or nickname.

[Probably from Shelta, a language used by itinerant people (known as Irish Travelers) in the British Isles. It has about 86,000 speakers.]

Usage:

"The Duchess of York says it was 'naughty' for pop singer Fergie to use the moniker which originally referred to her former highness. Sarah Ferguson says she is the original Fergie and called the singer after she released her latest album, The Dutchess, to say she now owed the real duchess a charity concert." — CP; Lumpy vs. Humpy; Edmonton Sun (Canada); May 10, 2007.

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(1) A name, title or alias. See alias.

(2) A COM object that is used to create instances of other objects. Monikers save programmers time when coding various types of COM-based functions such as linking one document to another (OLE). See COM and OLE.

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also monicker

noun

The word or words by which one is called and identified: appellation, appellative, cognomen, denomination, designation, epithet, name, nickname, style, tag, title. Slang handle. See specific/general, words.

from Shelta
This word originated in Ireland

If you have a moniker, it's thanks to a small group of travelers in Ireland known, logically enough, as Travelers. They are like the people called Romani elsewhere in Europe and North America (and commonly known as Gypsies), keeping to themselves, living in vans, moving from place to place, and living on odd jobs and trades such as barn painting and selling linoleum. But the Irish Travelers are Irish.

Like the Romani, Irish Travelers have their own secret language or cant. Theirs is called Gammon or Shelta. Its origins are uncertain and disputed, but to some degree it derives from the Irish language, which belongs to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family. From Irish ainm developed Shelta munik, meaning "name," and somehow speakers of English managed to decipher that word and adopt it as moniker. It had spread to London as an English slang word for "name" by 1851.

In Ireland's present-day population of three and a half million, there are about 20,000 Travelers. A recent estimate is that 6,000 of them speak Shelta. That language, along with the Irish Travelers who speak it, has spread to the rest of the British Isles, where it is spoken by an additional 30,000, and to the United States, where there are an estimated 50,000 speakers of Shelta.

Here is the first line of the Lord's Prayer translated into a modern version of Shelta: "Our gathra, who cradgies in the manyak-norch, we turry kerrath about your moniker."

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - navn, tilnavn, vagabonds mærke (på låger, port etc.)

Nederlands (Dutch)
bijnaam

Français (French)
n. - nom

Deutsch (German)
n. - Spitzname, Name

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - παρατσούκλι

Italiano (Italian)
nomignolo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - apelido (m) (gír.), símbolo de identificação de um vagabundo (gír.)

Русский (Russian)
имя, кличка

Español (Spanish)
n. - apodo, mote, nombre, apelativo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - öknamn

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
名字, 绰号

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 名字, 綽號

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 이름, 별명

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 名前, あだ名

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) لقب, كنيه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮שם (עגה), כינוי, חתימה‬

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