Nailed the former, but I was born in the seventies.
Well, there you go. I had no idea I was in such inestimable company. I also get called Julie and it doesn’t bother me unless it’s a colleague who knows full well that there’s an a at the end but they simply can’t be bothered with the extra syllable.
“Verne”! I like it. Too late now to start asking people to call me that but it does appeal to me.
Every time I sign up for a website (apart from this one) I try to use jools but it’s always taken, so I go through the joools, joolz, jooolz thing. I’m guessing your cousin has beaten me to it every time.
I have actively discouraged boyfriends from calling me Jules or any variation because I have an ick factor about someone in my bed using my brother’s nickname for me. My dad often calls me “J.” I have always been pretty scrupulous about what nicknames I pick up. In my mother’s family nicknames run long and deep. Both my Grandfather and his youngest sister (closer in age to my mother, in fact my mother was named after this aunt) had nicknames from infancy to grave, and there are many people who do not know the “real” names of the people in question.
Interestingly my great aunt was always called a nickname based on a childish misinterpretation of her real name. My mother is only 4 years younger, and was given the same name. (A very unusual name, actually) but Mom was always called by her proper name, and her aunt lived in Sudbury, so they saw each other infrequently. In (er 40s after being widowed Auntie moved to our town and thought “Now I will start fresh and use my full name now.” Except my mother and two of mom’s sisters already worked in the same building. When one of my aunts heard who was coming she said “Oh Great! “Nickname” got the job!” By the time my Great Aunt started her office door had a nameplate with the nickname, the memos had gone around with the nickname etc. Everyone knows my mom and that although the new transfer from Sudbury had the same name, she went by a different nickname. :smack:
My aunt laughed it off, but the moral of the story is that if you go to work in a building full of relatives, don’t expect to assume a new identity. 
I answered “Nickname”. Assuming that going by “Rik” instead of “Richard” counts as a “nickname”.
Voted First Name. But it’s complicated
Name A:My legal name, same as my dad. Only used in official contexts and by an aunt by marriage, because my Dad left us when young and didn’t see us much after that.
Name B:Nickname, totally unrelated. Used by mom, sis, and most of the people in my hometown. Actually appears on my school transcripts, but abandoned it when it caused too much confusion in college.
Name C:Nickname, sounds a lot like B but not the same. Used by Dad’s side of the family. Nobody seems to agree which got used earlier.
Name D: Diminutive of A. Used by anybody who knew me after college. Started using it not as much for dislike of the full name but because nobody pronounced it correctly.
(bolding mine)
LOL - I have one aunt (my dad’s younger sister) who continued to always call me “Richard” for 30+ years after I started going by Rick/Rik. Everybody else called me “Rik”, but she doggedly stuck with “Richard”. “You’ll always be ‘Richard’ to me!” she said. She was, like, 17 or 18 when I was born (1966), and probably thought it was “neato” having a baby nephew, and she hung on to that; my other aunt, who was 15 or 16 when I was born, easily switched to calling me “Rik” when I started going by that name. It would be an interesting psychological study about the difference, because I wonder if the difference had any relationship to the fact that my aunt who hung onto “Richard” never married, while my other aunt did marry and have children. Then there is the fact that my dad’s older brother went by his first name, and the older of my two aunts also always went by her first name, while my dad and his youngest sister always went by their middle names.
My aunt finally caved in and started calling me “Rik” just a couple years ago. I waited a few months to make sure she was going to stick with it … then joked to her that, now that she was finally calling me “Rik”, I was going to announce on my 50th birthday (next May) that, “I’m too old to be a “Rik”! You will all call me, “Richard” now!” 
(And honestly, I have always been a bit taken aback when I have met men who are around my parents’ age who go by “Rick”. I know I shouldn’t be, but … Richards of that age tended to either stick with “Richard”, or go with “Dick”. The funny thing is that “Rick” is an older nickname than “Dick”. British rhyming slang, the same thing that turned “Margaret” into “Peggy”: Richard -> Rich -> Rick -> Dick. I was named after my dad’s best friend in high school, a guy who went on to go by “Dick”.
And speaking of “Dick” …
The younger aunt who went by her middle name? Her first name was (I say “was” because she died of spinal cancer [I had never heard of that before] a couple years ago) “Lorena”. That was also her mother’s/my grandmother’s first name, and it is also the first name of my cousin, that aunt’s oldest daughter. And my cousin is the first one in my family to actually go by that name. My aunt went with her middle name, “Kae” (and I’m just now really curious about how my grandparents decided on a distinctly Korean-American-looking spelling), and my grandmother …
… my grandmother answered to “Dick” for her entire life. Yup, “Grandma Dick”. Yes, it was a joke. Her two younger sisters were “Pete” and “Johnny”, and they also went by those names their whole lives. On the rare occasions where I saw the three of them in the same room, they called each other by those names. The joke was that their father wanted a son, and got three daughters, and some wag back in the 1920s tagged these girls as Dick, Pete, and Johnny (great-grandpa must have complained too much about not having a son; he did finally father a son, Harold, who promptly got nicknamed “Mary”).
My grandmother embraced her nickname, and there ended up being some benefit to having such a nickname. After my grandfather passed in 1976, at age 58 (heart attack), my grandma started getting phone calls from salesmen - the type who preyed on widows. As she put it, “As soon as they call me “Lorena”, I know it’s somebody who doesn’t know me, and I hang up the damned phone.”
For some reason, not letting me take the pool. My middle name is one of the 4 apostles and last name is pretty common. My first name is generally considered to be a girls name (and I have yet to personally meet another guy with the name. It’s not “kim” although I’ve met two men named “Kim” in my life). So, in decending order:
- go by my middle name (but it’s very common, and if there are too many folks with that name, then I switch
- full version of my last name. It is “stevens”. I use the full monty, so no steve, stevie, steven for me me, but I’m perfectly fine if you call me “stevens”
- when there is the case of the same biblical first name followed by stevens, then I add in my first initial K. All my email, freemail, personal accounts are the initial K, biblical name stevens, and I’ve never had an issue establishing a new one because it was taken already.
I’ve met two men in my life named “Kim”
I go by my first name with people I know. I am Mr. Scumpup with people I don’t know well. I don’t care for nicknames and have never accepted being called by one.
I’m in the process of legally changing my full firstname (four words, or maybe two, or maybe a different four, or a different two, depending on which database you look at) into a single-word version. The single-word version is culturally considered an abbreviation (think “Mike” for “Michael”), not a nickname. That abbreviation is how I’m known by anybody other than government workers and telemarketers, since before I was capable of introducing myself.
Mona Lisa, if you ever get to Italy or a Spanish-speaking country (I think Portuguese-speaking as well), you should be able to get enough Julia knicknacks to make up for a whole life of knicknacky deprivation.
Me too, then I noticed I’d already voted in the poll which was started in 2014!
I use my full first name.
My father’s first name was Charles. My mother didn’t like Charles or Charley, he didn’t like Chuck, and neither of them liked his middle name or the common shortened version of it. So for the whole ~29 years they were married she called him by the first syllable of our last name.
Other. People who know me primarily through my writing call me Arabella, or Ari. People who know me primarily through performing or costume/fashion design call me Circe.
I didn’t actually mean to change my identity wholesale. I’ve told them all what my legal name is. So far exactly one of them has ever retained it, and he only uses it when I’m being exasperating. Although, in retrospect, I’ve accidentally done it before – at one point in my life, even my roommates addressed me by my very-long-time screenname.
On official documentation, I’m usually two initials and a surname. I started doing it in college, out of a vague sense that it would look more dignified on academic papers. The signature is a lot more fun as well. There are a lot of loops in it. 
Since the OP is still around…When you say nickname, do you mean a shortened version of a given name, or a different world altogether, like Sport or Ace?
I’d like to be Gwendolen (my given first name) but I end up as Gwen. It’s easier on all of us.
I am NOT – I repeat NOT – being a smartass. At zombie events and among bikers I am almost always my nickname; even a lot of family use it in reference to me. For work the last year and most of “normal” daily life I go by my first name.
I go by a shortened version of my first name, as do all guys of my generation who have my first name. Seriously, I have never met anyone with the name that goes by the whole thing- it’s only used on documents or by one’s angry wife or mother.
^This, although I have know of a handful of males who use the full version of my name. My signature, however, is 1st initial and last name.
I go by the standard shortened form of my first name, which I assume doesn’t count as a nickname for purposes of this poll.
When I was 7-8, the neighbor’s toddler daughter used to just love me and followed me around whenever she could. She couldn’t pronounce my first name, so she called me “LeeLee”. Somehow that stuck. The only place I don’t use the nickname is at work, but have told them it exists, since every once in a while someone will call and ask for me under that name.